infoTECH Feature

October 20, 2015

New Research Shows Enterprises Falling Short on Data Control

Big data and virtualization technologies continue to grow exponentially as companies scramble to implement cost effective and efficient ways to deal with increasing amounts of data. That trend was reflected in recent research from IDC (News - Alert), as commissioned by copy data virtualization specialist Actifio.

The company has observed a major increase in its number of enterprise customers recently, as companies seek better ways to control access to confidential data. Actifio says its customers are especially interested in implementing improved access control for data protection as well as application development. Despite this, the IDC research shows a whopping two-thirds of enterprises do not meet best practice standards when it comes to data control.

"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, research director, storage systems and software of IDC. "Copy data is costly, and introduces risk when it needs to be accessed. Organizations 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."

Actifio offers its Virtual Data Pipeline technology, which lets large companies capture data directly from production applications. Data is then managed through a single master copy located in a secure environment, while virtual copies are used to maintain accessibility and control.

But according to the IDC research, 77 percent of those organizations surveyed fail to mask sensitive data during the testing and development process, increasing the threat of a data breach. An average company holds 375 data copies with each one containing sensitive information, so this increases the risk of an attack significantly. And while CIOs are critical to the implementation of data control and security policies, those policies are only applied around 34 percent of the time. As a result, IDC predicts copy data will end up costing IT organizations $50.63 billion by 2018, consuming as much as 60 percent of their IT storage hardware and infrastructure budgets.

"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. Actifio gives customers a single system of record to take control of their secondary data, and more and more CIOs are taking a proactive approach to reduce the threat of exposure."




Edited by Kyle Piscioniere
FOLLOW US

Subscribe to InfoTECH Spotlight eNews

InfoTECH Spotlight eNews delivers the latest news impacting technology in the IT industry each week. Sign up to receive FREE breaking news today!
FREE eNewsletter

infoTECH Whitepapers