According to a global study by data storage giant EMC, organisations are failing to appreciate the growing challenges of protecting their data and in the last 12 months13% more businesses experienced data loss or disruption, costing them an average of US$914,000.

EMC’s Global Data Protection Index 2016, an independent study by Vanson Bourne, reveals that nearly a quarter (23%) of businesses surveyed had experienced data loss or unplanned systems disruption due to an external security breach, with that number increasing to over one third (36%) when taking internal breaches into account.

EMC says businesses are increasingly facing threats not just to their primary data, but also to their backup and protection data and suggests that, whether combating cyber extortionists demanding cash to unlock data encrypted by ransomware, or other risks posed to backup and protection data, businesses need to find solutions that put their “data of last resort beyond harm’s reach”.

David Goulden, chief executive officer, EMC Information Infrastructure, says customers are “facing a rapidly evolving data protection landscape on a number of fronts, whether it’s to protect modern cloud computing environments or to shield against devastating cyber attacks”.

“Our research shows that many businesses are unaware of the potential impact and are failing to plan for them, which is a threat in itself.”

And, according to Steve Duplessie, founder and senior analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), ransomware is dramatically raising the stakes when it comes to cyber security.

"We’re moving from theft, which is costly, to potential catastrophe. There are forces at play now that aren’t satisfied with just stealing your money, they want to destroy your entity. You can either start taking these threats seriously, or start looking for a hole to crawl into. Ignorance is no longer bliss.”

According to the EMC index, more than 80% of survey respondents indicated that their organisations would run at least part of eight key business applications in the public cloud in the next two years – but  less than half said they protect cloud data against corruption and less than half against deletion.

And, more than half of the respondents said they already run their email solution in the public cloud and, overall, they already had, on average, 30% of their IT environments based in the public cloud.

The survey also reveals that more than 70% of organisations are not very confident they could fully recover their systems or data in the event of data loss or unexpected systems downtime, and EMC says confidence also suffers when it comes to data centre performance, with 73% declaring they are not very confident their solutions will be able to keep pace with the faster performance and new capabilities of flash storage.

EMC has launched a new Isolated recovery solutions line which it says is to help organisations “air gap” a protection instance of their data from the networked enterprise. It says the solution, based on its VMAX, Data Domain and professional services technologies, is designed to enable businesses to create a “virtual panic room” for their most valuable data, isolating it from networked systems that could be compromised in a cyber attack.