Data Recovery Digest

The Dell Technologies Forum happened recently. There the company announced two new technology solutions to help companies accelerate their digital transformation. This included the PowerProtect DD Series Appliances, a product which protects storage appliances across a range of environments.

Saravanan Krishnan, Director of Data Protection Solutions for Dell South Africa, spoke at the media briefing and said that businesses are now finding an overwhelming amount of data is being created and stored. That’s certainly true. Not only is the amount of data being produced increasing, but so is the individual file size.

In Asia Pacific and Japan, the average amount of data managed per business was 8.13 petabytes in 2018. That’s a 384 percent increase over what it was in 2016. The research also found that 94 percent of businesses have at least one difficulty when it comes to protecting their data.

This includes being unable to keep track of all their data due to team growth, the complexities of configuring new software and hardware, and the inability to properly protect emerging technologies like IoT or AI.

We are in the early stages of digital transformation, so it’s not unsurprising to hear that businesses are struggling to keep up. Another common challenge is that businesses use multiple vendors to supply their data needs. It’s a skill in itself to be able to manage a multiple vendor environment, in terms of both storing and backing up the data.

Ransomware attacks are also on the rise. That’s troubling. But what’s more troubling is that ransomware has evolved to be able to infiltrate the backup software. Your backups are rendered useless if both your primary data source and the backup are infected. You then just have multiple copies of inaccessible data.

Legacy systems and infrastructure are also problematic for companies trying to move towards transformation. If you don’t have a holistic approach to understand all the areas of the organisation, all the systems, and all the weak entry points, you don’t have a proper grip over your data.

It was also found that 80 percent of companies have experienced some sort of disruption in the last year, mostly down to things like system downtime, data loss and ransomware attacks.

Part of that also included 32 percent of respondents saying they were unable to recover data. That’s more than double from the previous year. Krishnan said that this was because organisations don’t know what to recover, nor when to recover it.

These companies have not taken the necessary disaster recovery plans, especially smaller businesses. It’s very important to consistently test your data under stress situations; if a real data disaster did happen, you need to know that you would be able to recover from it.

“The technologies that we have today, especially the emerging ones, related to the AI, machine learning and IoT, all of these are fuelling new platforms, new technologies, new revenue streams, new business models and new ways to solve the world’s problems,” said Krishnan. That’s all well and true, but it’s entirely useless if your data recovery isn’t up to scratch.