It’s a simple question:  Do your customers have an adequate data protection strategy?  The answer, however, is probably not so straight forward.

I would expect “sort of” is probably the most truthful answer.  I don’t think many partners would answer on the extremes of “definitely not” or “absolutely yes.”  

Let’s face it – there are a lot of competing IT priorities, and data protection may not always rise to the top.  Furthermore, it’s probably challenging for you to quantify for your customers exactly what the risk is from a “sort of” protection strategy.  It’s not until something unplanned happens and there is a major disruption to the business that data protection gets more attention.

But, the good news is that we have something that will change your conversation with your customers.  It’s called the EMC Global Data Protection Index.

This new EMC-commissioned primary research illustrates the current state of data protection.  It also introduces an index for you to show your customers what “good” looks like and where they fall along a data protection maturity curve.   The survey was conducted by a 3^rd party research specialist, Vanson Bourne, over 24 countries, capturing input from 3,330 IT decisions makers across both public and private industries. 

Globally, the current state of data protection looks like this:

• 64% of organizations have suffered from a disruption over the past 12 months, either from unplanned downtime and/or data loss.  We estimate this costs global enterprises $1.7T per year.
• Companies are ill prepared to face the protection challenges for next generation workloads, such as hybrid cloud, big data and mobile devices.  In fact, 51% of respondents don’t have a disaster recovery plan for any of these new workloads. 
• The number of data loss incidents is fewer than in previous years, but the amount of data lost is on the rise.  The estimated average data loss is 2.33TB, which is approximately 24 million emails – and 400% more data lost than in our previous surveys.

The other part of this study is the maturity curve that quantifies what “good” looks like.  There are a number of criteria we used to allocate points based on responses regarding recovery experience, strategy and infrastructure.   We then created 4 equal segments - Laggards (scoring 1–25), Evaluators (scoring 26-50), Adopters (scoring 51-75) and Leaders (scoring 76-100).  (You can find the full methodology in the report published on the microsite). 

What the index tells us is:

• Only 13% of organizations are “ahead of the curve” on data protection maturity, meaning they are the most advanced with adoption of data protection technology.  They also suffer the least disruption and are the most confident in their ability to recover.
• 50% of organizations fall into the “Evaluator” category, which means they are starting to deploy some modern data protection approaches, but there are still gaps that lead to lengthy recovery times and also a lack of confidence in their ability to recover.

As a partner, what does this all mean?  One word: opportunity.  This is the opportunity to have a different conversation with your customers on why they need to evolve from “sort of” protected to “absolutely yes.”   How can you get there?  Answer: the data protection continuum.  

I’ll be back next month to give you additional views on the survey and how the data protection continuum can help you to help your customers to move up the rankings.  In the meantime, we recorded a short Brainshark for our partners on this project.