Data Protection Costs US $400 Million a Year, EVault Says

May 8, 2012 Alex Woodie

Surprisingly poor data protection strategies are costing companies big bucks, according to a recent survey commissioned by EVault. The Seagate subsidiary found that most of the data loss instances, which can cost a company tens of millions of dollars, could have been prevented with an investment in better data protection.

EVault’s survey, which was conducted in the U.S., the U.K., and France, generated some interesting factoids about the state of data protection and data loss. For example, it found that 20 percent of organizations that manage between 2 TB and 7 TB of data suffered a data loss in the last year. Ten percent of organizations with this amount of data in play suffered two to three losses in the last year.

These midsize organizations with 2 TB to 7 TB of data found that each instance of data loss cost the organization 2 to 5 percent of its annual revenues on average (although companies in the U.S. Northeast put the figure at 10 percent). For a midsize company with $500 million in annual revenue, that 2 to 5 percent hit translates into $10 million to $25 million in lost profits–for each instance of data loss. Based on this data, the report pegs the total financial hit for data loss in this country at $400 million.

These results were “troubling,” said Terry Cunningham, president and general manager of EVault. “The level of data loss is huge, and only a few organizations are employing data protection best practices,” Cunningham stated in a press release. “When largely preventable data loss conservatively costs businesses hundreds of millions of dollars annually, it is time to rethink your priorities.”

EVault, of course, is in the business of protecting data. The company–which apparently has gone back to using the EVault name after calling itself i365 for several years–is one of the biggest providers of online data vaulting. Its data vaulting technology supports the IBM i operating system and DB2/400 database, and its services are used by 35,000 companies. It also has an extensive reseller and OEM channel, as its technology is used by SafeData, Venyu, SunGard, and others.

Best practices require moving backup facilities away from the primary data center, but too few companies are doing this, owing in part to the trend of consolidating backup locations, the Santa Clara, California, company found. And while nearly all U.S. companies have some data residing on a mobile device–such as a laptop, tablet, or smartphone–40 percent of them have no data protection plan in place for the data on the mobile devices.

All this bad news actually bodes well for EVault, which sees its cloud-based disaster recovery solution as the answer to these needs. “There are still huge opportunities for companies to improve their overall disaster recovery strategies by incorporating off-premise solutions and integrating mobile devices into the equation,” Cunningham says. “We believe we will see greater adoption in both areas in 2012.”

The study was put together by Vanson Bourne, a research and marketing company commissioned by EVault. The outfit interviewed 250 IT decision makers in the financial service and retail industries across two regions of the U.K., the Paris area of France, and three regions of the United States, including the Northeast, Texas, and California.