Has COVID Changed How Organizations Look at their Data Protection Strategies?
New Insights from IDC Show that Companies are Modernizing their Backup and DR
More than a year into the pandemic, COVID has certainly changed the way organizations do business. That is nothing new. But that’s just one of the challenges shifting the IT landscape faster than ever before. In this past year, ransomware and other malware attacks have escalated and dominated the news cycle, causing business losses totaling millions of dollars along with hard hits to brand reputations. Again, nothing new. Sad, but something we have all become accustomed to recently.
However, what is new is how companies are reacting to this changing landscape and how they are looking to augment and supplement their IT infrastructure.
But let’s dive even deeper.Specifically, how are companies changing their backup and disaster recovery (DR) strategies? We turned to IDC to survey more than 500 global IT and business leaders to understand what kept them up at night and how they were prioritizing these changes, especially as we move deeper into work-from-home (WFH) and hybrid working environments.
Here are some of the key learnings from IDC’s survey*:
- 7% of organizations surveyed saw an impact to their WFH data protection as a result of COVID.
- Because of this, 90.8% of respondents point to modernizing data protection, including backup and DR, as a top IT priority that is crucial to their overall digital transformation.
- Many organizations are modernizing their infrastructure. IDC estimates 80% of new applications will be deployed in the cloud or at the edge**, where most cloud applications will either be SaaS or cloud-native containerized While this modernization will help companies in the long run, it can also create a potential data management gap.
- From the survey, an alarming 95.1% of organizations have suffered a ransomware or malware attack in the past 12 months.
- More than 80% indicating at least one attack resulting in data corruption.
- 43% experiencing unrecoverable within the past 12 months.
- More than one-third of those surveyed suffered more than 25 attacks during that time.
- As these threats increase, 31.1% of respondents reported a direct loss of revenue and 35% suffered from instances of unrecoverable data.
- The indirect cost in terms of people may have been even more costly with 45.4% reporting a loss of employee productivity, with nearly half (49%) incurring employee overtime to combat the attack and get businesses back online.
- Couple this with other IDC research showing that the cost of downtime ranges from thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars per hour, organizations are faced with greater revenue and employee implications.
But what does this mean and how will organizations move these strategies forward? The IDC survey found that more than half (52.1%) plan to invest in both backup and DR improvements. And one of the key technologies now emerging to help IT organizations improve data protection, reduce data loss, and recover data more quickly is (CDP). In fact, CDP is becoming a key means of driving toward near-zero RPO and near-zero RTO. Moreover, the highly granular nature of CDP recoveries can assist organizations in recovering to a point just prior to a cyberattack to assure recovery with the least amount of data loss possible.
These are staggering statistics about data loss that serve as an eye opener about the importance of protecting your data-driven business, especially as this is just a small slice of the survey results.
I invite you to learn more about this research and what your colleagues are saying about their backup and DR strategies by reading the full report here: https://www.zerto.com/page/the-state-of-data-protection-and-disaster-recovery-readiness/
*“IDC White Paper, sponsored by Zerto, The State of Data Protection and Disaster Recovery Readiness: 2021, #US47606921 April 2021”
**IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Datacenter 2020 Predictions, Doc # US44747919, October 2019
Caroline Seymour 
