Data Is Increasingly Difficult to Back Up: 8 Noble Truths

To help organizations better understand the challenges of backup, disaster recovery and secure access, Acronis has created the "8 Noble Truths" of data protection. To view all 8 Noble Truths, please download the whitepaper. This is the second post in an eight-part series to help you protect your data:

Business functions today are increasingly digitized. As a result, there’s more data on more devices and in more places that IT must protect and store every day. Companies are finding that even the smallest details are worth backing up, not only to save recovery time should data go missing, but also to ensure that people can glean valuable insights from the ever-growing trove of data.

So, what keeps companies from protecting their data? Here are several factors that explain why data backup is more difficult — and more important — than ever: 

Data creation is exploding:

•        By 2020, the digital world will reach 40 trillion gigabytes, according to IDC research
•        90 percent of the world’s data was created in the past two years, according to IBM
•        87 percent of U.S. adults are on the Internet, says one Pew Internet study
•        250 billion photos have been uploaded to Facebook
•        35 million “selfies” are published each day on Instagram
•        400 million tweets are posted each day onTwitter

With near-constant connectedness, companies are producing more data, in more places and from more types of devices. And that data deluge doesn’t show any signs of slowing. Mobile and social technologies have further increased the amount and type of data that businesses produce — and there’s no end in sight. 

The emerging “Internet of Things” technology trend will multiply the amount of data that business produce, protect and analyze. By 2020, Cisco predicts that there will be up to 50 billion connected devices. In tandem, backup windows are shrinking.

“Today, we have everything from heart monitors to traffic cameras to smart refrigerators that can be used to collect and monitor data,” says Joel Berman, Acronis Fellow and longtime IT expert.

IT professionals must rethink how they protect any data across all locations to ensure their company can derive value from the loads of data produced every day.  

Unreliable (or non-existent) backup strategies, however, put company data at risk and limit decision makers’ ability to derive value from company data. A study last year by Spiceworks found that 45 percent of small businesses had suffered a data loss and that 14 percent of them were never able to recover the data. And 65 percent of organizations aren’t ready for natural disasters, failing to back up data to the cloud. A more alarming statistic is that 72 percent of companies go out of business within two years following a major data loss.

The world has changed, and legacy backup technologies and methods that worked five years ago simply won’t suffice. As digital data becomes more prevalent, IT must re-evaluate their data protection strategies in order to protect any data, across any location, in any environment. 

[Image via Can Stock Photo]

READ MORE: 

• Data is Everything (Noble Truth #1)