The move to the cloud is well underway, and virtual storage is being used by a majority of companies. However, security practices are not keeping up. A full 84 percent of corporations in a Kroll Ontrack survey said they are using it, and nearly one-third of respondents have 75 percent to 100 percent of their current environment stored virtually. However, a whopping 40 percent surveyed said that they experienced at least one data loss event in the past 12 months within a virtualized environment.
Of those that store data in a virtual environment, 52 percent actually believe virtualization software decreases the chance of data loss, meaning that perception and reality are not lining up in IT departments.
“It is a common misconception that virtual environments are inherently safer than, or at less risk from data loss, than other storage media,” explained Paul Le Messurier, data recovery operations manager at Kroll Ontrack UK. “Although virtual servers have redundancies built-in, increased complexity generally means more potential causes of data loss, including file system corruption, deleted virtual machines, internal virtual disk corruption, RAID and other storage/server hardware failures, and deleted or corrupt files contained within virtualized storage systems. The effects are also usually far more serious because the volume of data stored in a virtual environment is exponential to that stored on a single physical server or storage device.”
That 40 percent of companies experiencing data loss is actually down from 2011, when 65 percent reported lost data. But, the survey went on to reveal that only 33 percent of companies that experienced loss were able to recover 100 percent of their lost data in 2012, which represents a 21 percent decrease from 2011, when 54 percent were able to recover all of their data. That, of course, leaves a full 67 percent of respondents that were not able to get all their data back from their most recent data loss event.
When asked about how organizations attempted recovery, the largest portion of respondents, 43 percent, actually rebuilt the data. Only one in four looked to a data recovery company.
“As the use of VMware has matured into a more mainstream infrastructure and it appears fewer data loss incidents are occurring, organizations are still experiencing these incidents,” said Phil Bridge, managing director, Kroll Ontrack UK. “The decreased ability to fully restore data proves that by not engaging an experienced data recovery service after a virtual environment data loss, the risk of permanent data loss increases.”
