$17 Billion: The Annual Cost of Data Loss and Downtime in Canada

The cost of data loss and downtime in Canada is staggering, suggests a recent study.

Data loss and downtime cost enterprises $17 billion in 2014 in Canada, according to the EMC Global Data Protection Index conducted by Vanson Bourne. The report reveals that data loss is up 400% since 2012.

Moreover, well over half of IT professionals are not fully confident in their ability to recover information following an incident, while more than a third of organizations lack a disaster recovery plan for emerging workloads.

Interestingly, the number of data loss incidents is actually decreasing overall. However, the volume of data lost during an incident is growing exponentially in Canada, according to the report.

“This research highlights the enormous monetary impact of unplanned downtime and data loss to businesses everywhere,” said Michael Sharun, President, EMC Canada. “With 62% of IT decision-makers interviewed feeling challenged to protect hybrid cloud, big data and mobile, it’s understandable that almost all of them lack the confidence that data protection will be able to meet future business challenges.”

Business trends, such as big data, mobile, and hybrid cloud are creating new challenges for data protection in Canada. 55% of businesses lack a disaster recovery plan for any of these environments and just 1% have a plan for all three. 54% rated big data, mobile and hybrid cloud as “difficult” to protect.

“We hope the global data protection index will prompt IT leaders to pause and reevaluate whether their current data protection solutions are in alignment with today’s business requirements as well as their long term goals,” Sharun added.