Data Security

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 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 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.

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 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.