MORE than two thirds, or 72 percent, of South Africa respondents were concerned their organisation’s existing data protection solutions would not be able to meet all future business challenges, the Dell Technologies 2021 Global Data Protection Index (GDPI) survey found.
According to the study of 1 000 global IT decision makers, these concerns were well-founded, with 20 percent of South African respondents reporting data loss in the last year and nearly half, or 44 percent, experiencing unplanned system downtime.
The study found that organisations were managing more than 10 times the amount of data than they did five years ago from 1.45 petabytes in 2016 to 14.6 petabytes in this year.
Dell Technologies South Africa managing director Doug Woolley said as the digital economy grew, so too did data volumes and, in turn, the cyber threat surface area.
In South Africa, almost half, 46 percent of the respondents, lacked confidence that all their business-critical data could be recovered in the event of a destructive cyber attack or data loss. This was better than the global average of 67 percent.
Some 12 percent believed emerging technologies such as cloud-native applications, Kubernetes containers, artificial intelligence and machine learning posed a risk to data protection, and the lack of data protection solutions for newer technologies was a top-three challenge for organisations.
BUSINESS REPORT ONLINE