Research by a security company shows that running regular backups for data, as well as encrypting them, is necessary in order for organizations to ensure that their information neither gets lost, nor falls into the wrong hands.
Drives that go undetected by the device – which can be caused by failing hardware or voltage fluctuations – are the most common issue leading to a loss of data.
According to the latest Data Loss Index, quarterly report by the security firm Kroll Ontrack, undetected drives account for 25% of work data losses in organizations across the world.
“Recovery rates of lost work-related data for personal devices are low.”
The most recent Kroll Ontrack’s report, which is based on the results of 2,226 users of the firm’s Data Recovery Self-Assessment tool from 43 countries, also shows that over two thirds of data losses happened on laptops (36%) and external hard drives (34%).
A Previous Data Loss Index provided by the same security firm and focusing on the UK, showed that over one 12-month period, more than a quarter of UK employees lost work data due to malfunction or corruption of technology. The research also showed that just 68% of those work data lost from devices was recovered; thus, almost a third of all work-related data lost was irrecoverable.
The report also uncovered that 33% employees in the UK have used personal devices or cloud services to store work-related data in the last 12 months – and also that recovery rates of lost data among these devices are low. 19% of users successfully recovered lost work-related data from home desktops, 17% from laptops and tablets and only 8% from personal mobile devices.
“These research data highlight the importance for organizations to back up all their critical data. And because devices can also get lost or stolen, it’s also important to have all critical data encrypted,” commented Peter Stančík, a security evangelist at ESET.
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