| Global corporate data size averages 7x↑ in 2 years
| The average cost of data loss is $1 million
| Domestic companies lack data protection and technological changes

Dell EMC released the 2018 Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) report on the 25th, which surveyed and analyzed the data protection status and strategic maturity of companies around the world.

According to the report, although companies’ awareness of the value of data and the importance of data security has increased overall, the risk of losing data has actually increased. In the case of Korean companies, they have more data than the global average, but the proportion of data security-related incidents experienced is also relatively high and they are not prepared for it.

This GDPI report, the third to be released following 2014 and 2016, is based on a survey conducted by market research firm Vanson Bourne commissioned by Dell EMC. The survey respondents were 2,200 people from 18 countries and 11 industries around the world, and the target group was IT managers from public institutions or companies with 250 or more employees. One hundred IT decision makers from Korean companies also participated in this survey.


Average data size is about 7 times larger than in 2016, and the number of unrecoverable data loss experiences has also doubled
The report noted that the amount of data held by enterprises has increased rapidly in just two years, from an average of 1.45 petabytes (PB) in 2016 to an average of 9.7 PB in 2018, nearly seven times more.


With the explosion of corporate data, the role of data in business operations is becoming more important, and awareness of 'monetization', which utilizes data to create real profits, is also increasing.


However, companies are still exposed to many problems related to data security issues. 76% of respondents experienced data-related failures and accidents in the past year, and 27% experienced data loss that was irretrievable. This figure is more than double the 14% in 2016.


Companies that use a single vendor for data protection have lower incident rates than those that use multiple vendors
Companies using more than one data protection company were found to be 35% more likely to experience such incidents than companies using a single vendor, making them relatively vulnerable to data-related threats.

The most common data-related failures and accidents experienced by companies using multiple data protection vendors are ▲unexpected system outages (43%) ▲data access blockage due to ransomware attacks (32%) ▲irrecoverable data loss (29%), etc. Among these, data loss was found to cause enormous financial damage to companies.


According to the report, over the past year, companies lost an average of 2.13 terabytes (TB) of data due to various failures and accidents, resulting in damages of approximately $1 million. That's nearly double the $520,000 loss suffered by companies that experienced an average of 20 hours of system downtime.


The report cited the following as challenges companies face with regard to data protection: ▲Increased complexity and cost due to the explosion of data (46%) ▲Lack of data protection solutions related to new technologies such as AI, machine learning, cloud, and IoT (45%) ▲Strengthening regulations and compliance related to information protection such as GDPR (41%). On the other hand, only 16% of companies responded that the data protection solutions they are currently using will be able to flexibly respond to future environmental changes.

Meanwhile, it was found that the cloud is emerging as a major strategy for protecting corporate data. In this survey, the adoption rate of public cloud increased from 28% in 2016 to 40% in 2018, and 98% of them answered that they are using public cloud for data protection. The areas of use were diverse, including ▲backing up data in public cloud (41%), ▲backing up on-premises data to the cloud (41%), ▲protecting SaaS applications (40%), and ▲using it as a data protection solution that can expand from on-premises to the cloud (40%). When choosing a data protection solution in a cloud environment, the most important factor to consider is ‘scalability’ (64%) to prepare for the explosive growth of data.


Domestic companies have higher average data holdings than the global average, but their protection status is weak and they are not prepared for technological changes.
In the case of domestic companies, the amount of data held increased at a tremendous rate from an average of 1.59 PB in 2016 to an average of 11.31 PB in 2018. This is higher than the global average, but it was revealed that they are actually more vulnerable to data-related failures and accidents.

The percentage of Korean companies that responded that they had experienced data-related failures and accidents in the past year was 90%, 14%p higher than the global average (76%). The percentage of companies that experienced data loss that could not be restored also increased by more than six times from 5% in 2016 to 32%, indicating that Korean companies urgently need to come up with countermeasures for data loss.


Confidence in the changes in the data protection environment that new technologies will bring was also lower than the global average. Only 6% of Korean companies were confident that their current data protection solutions could flexibly respond to future environmental changes, which was less than half the global average (16%).