Aussie firms lose $66bn yearly from downtime, data loss

Australian businesses lose a combined US$55 billion ($66.2 billion) from data loss and unplanned downtime per year, research from EMC shows.

A survey from the storage vendor shows that 64% of Australian enterprises have experienced data loss or downtime over the last 12 months. During this period, the companies reported an average of 27 hours of unexpected downtime.

But 78% of Australian IT professionals are not fully confident in their ability to recover information following an incident and 58% still lack a disaster recovery plan for workloads generated by emerging technologies such as the hybrid cloud, big data or mobility.

Only around 7% of Australian companies have a data protection plan for all three technologies.

Some 86% of Australian businesses are behind the curve when it comes to data protection technology adoption, and only 2% can be considered data protection ‘leaders’.

Companies with at least three data protection vendor suppliers spend more on infrastructure, but paradoxically report losing 10 times as much data as those relying on just one.

“This research highlights the enormous monetary impact of unplanned downtime and data loss to businesses everywhere,” EMC Core Technologies President Guy Churchward said.

“With 62% of IT decision-makers interviewed feeling challenged to protect hybrid cloud, big data and mobile, it’s understandable that almost all of them lack the confidence that data protection will be able to meet future business challenges.”

Image courtesy Adrian under CC