Data Loss More Prevalent than Many Expect
Data loss is a big deal in almost every industry. No matter how secure and safe information may seem at any given moment, just one problem can snowball and put a company in dire straits. As protected as they may feel, these companies may feel foolish if this happens, as hard drive failure – one of the most popular forms of storage giving up the ghost – is responsible for a vast deal of data loss.
Nearly three-quarters of people reported having lost data from drives in laptops or desktop computers, Beta News reported. In comparison, SSDs only saw 15 percent of respondents having these issues, while just 13 percent saw failure come from RAID or virtual services failing.
Of course, these weren’t the only instances of failure. Software or data error were the cause of nearly one in five of these instances. Still, drive crashes were seen 66 percent of the time, a huge increase from 2010 when just 29 percent of failures were from that same problem.
“Storage media fails regardless of type; it is just a matter of when,” said Paul le Messurier, the program and operations manager of survey sponsor Kroll Ontrack. “This fact, coupled with the fact that HDDs are still the most prevalent drive is why HDD crashes have and continue to be the most common cause of data loss.”
Major issue
In the event that data was lost, these companies didn’t find easy ways to recover. More than a quarter of them suffered some form of business disruption from data loss events, and not all of the instances were so easy to recover from. Some 15 percent of business users said they lost important or sentimental personal data on work machines, while close to 10 percent saw business-related information lost from home computers.
One of the recommended ways to secure data better is to save it in the cloud, but that option is often fallible, Government Technology found. However, when using the cloud, some strategies are more effective than others. Performing cloud risk assessments is one way to better the odds of success, as it’s easy to find where data’s being stored and how risky its loss could be. Other steps include choosing specific cloud aspects to implement and studying the marketplace and providers before making final decisions as to what the best options in the marketplace will be.