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Data protection flaws in the cloud highlighted by losses

12 October 2011

Almost two-thirds (65 per cent) of businesses are continuing to experience frequent data loss from virtual environments, a new study has indicated.

According to the research published by Kroll Ontrack, this marks a 140 per cent year-on-year rise in the figure, with 53 per cent of respondents reporting five such incidents in the cloud during the past 12 months.

The data recovery specialist found that 12 per cent of those quizzed stated their organization had experienced losses of information more than five times during the period in question, with common causes including deleted virtual machines, internal disk corruption and file system corruption.

"Successful organizations realize that any disruption within the virtual infrastructure, regardless of how small, will have an amplified impact on the business as a whole," Kroll Ontrack Manager of Data Recovery Operations, Jeff Pederson explained, with potential effects such as financial costs, lost productivity, missed sales, non-compliance penalties and damage to corporate image noted by the company.

In related news, a report has warned that despite many small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) adopting mobile technologies and utilizing social networking, threats posed to business continuity by such solutions are not being understood.

This is the claim made by AVG, which has revealed a large proportion of smaller firms are not taking adequate precautions to manage risk in this area as they adopt new methods of operating.

According to the security software company, of the 1,000 ICT managers questioned in the UK and the US by GfK on the subject, 75 per cent were not fully aware of the potential threats to their organization from the use of mobile phones and one-third had not put appropriate safeguards in place for their social networking profiles.

Security Evangelist for AVG (AU/NZ) Lloyd Borrett advised: "New mobility technologies and social networking open businesses to opportunities for growth but also introduce the very nasty reality of security breaches and information theft."