The news is saturated with reports on network hackings and all things GDPR, and it’s more important than ever before that businesses in the West Midlands start looking at the methods they’re implementing to store, use and obtain their digital data.
Today, new research has been released that asks IT decision makers within West Midlands businesses how they’re handling and securing their data. Nearly all companies (87%) in the West Midlands who were surveyed stated they use more than one software solution for managing or transacting digital data within their business.
And a significant percentage are now storing their business-critical active data (93%) as well as their archive data (80%) on cloud-based storage solutions.
When asked what type of digital data they process and store in the cloud, the top five were:
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87% personnel information
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80% financial information
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73% documents
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53% archive data
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53% images
So, this begs the question, with all this important, and often sensitive, information being stored within West Midlands business’ IT software systems, just how valuable is this data to the company holding it? When the respondents were asked to put a monetary value on their digital data, 47% placed a value of over half a million pounds.
With all this data having such a high monetary value, it’s safe to assume that losing or damaging it would have a serious impact on the business. This view is further supported by the impact of the March 2017 WannaCry cyber-attack that infected over 300,000 computers across the globe and took down branches of the NHS. The survey results stated that 69% of businesses would find the impact of losing their digital data to be very negative.
Whilst the majority claimed their networks were secure, 20% of respondents in the West Midlands felt their digital data system was neither secure nor insecure, which is slightly worrying, particularly when it was also unclear about what actual data is being held.
Should something happen to their network, nearly all (80%) claimed they couldn’t go more than a day should their systems go down due to hardware failure or if their data was breached.
The more worrying statistics from the research came when the survey participants were asked if they had a strategy or precautions in place should something happen. 13% said they had no plan in place, but they were formulating one.
Cindy Phillips, Marketing Manager at OGL, who commissioned the study, says: “It’s interesting to see the results of this survey. As an IT solutions and cyber security company, we know how much of an impact having a digital data breach could have on a business. We have worked with companies who have experienced both natural disasters which has taken down their critical infrastructure as well as those who have had their systems held to ransom by cyber-criminals.
“What makes it so much more worrying is that more than one in ten (13%) people said they felt neither confident nor unconfident that the company could be up and running again within a reasonable timeframe if their digital data was affected! We invest significant amounts in the security and resilience of our cloud infrastructure as well in proactive cyber-protection to ensure our customers minimise their risk, but also to ensure robust backups and processes are in place to get them back up and running again. Having a well thought out disaster recovery and business continuity plan in place is critical.”
For more information, please visit: https://www.ogl.co.uk/the-importance-of-backing-up-to-the-cloud
