Two-Thirds Of Enterprises Failing To Meet Data Control Best Practices

A worrying amount of organisations are failing to ensure their company information stays secure by adhering to data control best practices, a new study has found.

Research by analyst firm IDC discovered that two-thirds of businesses are fall short when it comes to safeguarding their important data, meaning very few are likely to be consistent across the full spectrum of data security policies.

The study, commissioned by copy data virtualisation company Actifio, also found that a typical organisation holds 375 data copies, with each copy carrying sensitive information and therefore an increased risk of attack.

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Overall, the study quizzed 429 executives from five different verticals, (Government, Financial, Education, Healthcare and Retail) took part in the survey, with Government coming out on top in terms of implementing data control policies; with the Education sector lowest ranked.

77 percent of organisations surveyed failed to mask sensitive data during the test/development phase, which significantly increases the threat of a data breach.

“Our research clearly identified two major challenges faced by IT executives – the copy data proliferation problem and the copy data access problem,” said Phil Goodwin, IDC’s storage systems and software research director.

“Copy data is costly, and introduces risk when it needs to be accessed.  Organisations need solutions that can automate copy data management and subsequently reduce risk and cost in the enterprise and public sector environments; manual efforts are simply insufficient”

The enterprise copy data access problem is simply too large and broad for IT organisations to handle manually. By 2018, IDC estimates copy data will be cost IT organisations $50.63 billion and currently consumes up to 60 percent of the IT storage hardware and infrastructure budget.

“The truth is most companies have no idea how many copies of a given data set are floating around in their infrastructure or in the cloud,” said Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio.

“If you don’t know how many copies you have you don’t know where they are, and if you don’t know where they are you can’t tell who has access to them.”

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