Three quarters of firms fear irrevocable data loss

Pro

As many as three quarters of European business believe that they will never recover lost data from computer crashes.

This is one of the key findings of a survey commissioned by EMNC and carried out by Vanson Bourne. The EMC European Disaster Recovery Survey 2011, which covered 1,750 companies across Europe, found that 54% had either lost data or suffered systems downtime or both in the past year.

Three out of five of companies surveyed reported hardware failure as the primary cause of data loss and downtime while 43% cited loss of employee productivity as the single biggest economic impact.

Over one quarter (28%) of companies pointed to lost revenue as a result of a disaster while 40% of organisations still use tape for recovery and 80% want to replace tape altogether.

The research showed that data loss and downtime were caused by hardware failure in 61% of cases, power failure in 42% of cases and software failure in 35% of cases.

Natural disasters accounted for 7% of systems downtime or data loss while employee sabotage was to blame in 8% of cases. 

Regardless of the cause, 44% of organisations changed their backup procedures in response after an incident and 27% of businesses increased their spending on data recovery.

Bob Savage, vice president and managing director, EMC Ireland, said the findings show that companies need to focus on backup and disaster recovery to ensure continued business operations when common information technology failures occur.

"The results of the survey show that businesses need to rethink backup and recovery strategies.

"IT systems failures cost businesses time and money but, with a properly thought-out next-generation backup approach, companies can improve recovery from day-to-day outages as well as recoveries from something more severe," said Savage.

The study found that employee productivity dropped in 43% of companies as a result of systems downtime while 28% of businesses cited revenue loss as the main impact of IT failures.

In 27% of cases, delays in product development accounted resulted from IT systems downtime.

Systems failure resulted on average in two lost working days for the businesses in the survey, equivalent to 28,391 working hours for a company employing about 2,000 people.

Read More: Data protection