The State of DR and Cyber Recovery – Part 1: Understanding the Top Reasons for Data Loss and How to Prevent Them
Data loss can be a catastrophic event for any organization, leading to significant operational disruptions and financial repercussions. While ransomware often dominates headlines, several other critical factors contribute to data loss. Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company, released an IDC white paper based on a market survey to assess the state of modern data protection, disaster recovery, cyber recovery, and AI.
This post is the first in a series of three that explores insights from the IDC white paper, sponsored by Zerto— The State of Disaster Recovery and Cyber Recovery, 2024–2025: Factoring in AI¹— to help IT leaders enhance their strategies and operations.
Overview
According to the recent IDC white paper, while ransomware gets all the attention, human error remains a major cause of data loss. In addition, backup-related errors account for about one-third of data loss cases, including corrupted backups due to ransomware, backup system failures, and lost or damaged tapes. Although human error is inevitable, modern backup-related issues should be rare. Organizations that do not achieve a 96% success rate in backup and restore operations should evaluate their systems for improvement.
Issues like human error and backup-related failures can undermine even the most robust data protection strategies. In this blog, we will delve into the top reasons for data loss, uncovering how each one impacts your organization and providing practical solutions to mitigate these risks. With these, you can equip yourself with the knowledge to protect your data effectively and ensure resilience in the face of unforeseen challenges.
Top 5 Reasons for Data Loss and How Zerto Solves Them
Human error
Solution: Zerto’s continuous data protection (CDP) ensures that data is replicated in real time, allowing for quick recovery from accidental deletions or modifications. With Zerto, you can easily roll back to a precise point in time, minimizing the impact of human errors.
Data loss in the gap between backups
Solution: Traditional backup solutions often create gaps between backup intervals, leading to potential data loss. Zerto eliminates these gaps with CDP, providing near-zero recovery point objectives (RPOs). This ensures that all data changes are continuously captured, allowing you to recover the most recent data from a journal which includes thousands of checkpoints that are just seconds apart.
Corrupted/encrypted data due to malware/ransomware
Solution: Zerto, with its Cyber Resilience Vault, real-time replication, and point-in-time recovery, ensures rapid restoration of data to a state just seconds or minutes before a malware or ransomware attack. The storage and cloud vaults enhances this capability, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity even against sophisticated cyber threats.
Backup system failures
Solution: Backup system failures can be catastrophic, but Zerto’s one-to-many redundant processes offers a reliable alternative. By continuously replicating data to a secondary site, Zerto ensures that you always have an up-to-date copy of your data available, reducing dependency on traditional backup systems and mitigating the risk of backup failures.
Lost or damaged tapes
Solution: Physical tape storage is prone to loss and damage, leading to potential data loss. Zerto’s replication and the Zerto Cyber Resilience Vault eliminate the need for tape backups, offering a more secure and resilient solution. By storing replicated data on production-grade storage in secure, offsite locations, Zerto ensures that your data is always protected and easily accessible to the right personnel when needed.
Zerto provides a comprehensive solution to these common data loss scenarios, ensuring robust data protection and quick recovery to keep your business running smoothly.
In part 2 of this miniseries, we are going to look at the top disaster recovery challenges faced by organizations. Stay tuned! And in the meantime, get an overview of Zerto, and read the IDC white paper.
1 IDC white paper, sponsored by Zerto—The State of Disaster Recovery and Cyber Recovery, 2024–2025: Factoring in AI— #US52445524, August 2024
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Sarah Doherty Senior Product Marketing Manager
