EMC, the U.S. multinational corporation and the world’s largest provider of data storage systems, has released the EMC Global Data Protection Index and it turns out that worldwide, enterprises are losing as much as $1.7 trillion through data loss and unplanned downtime.

“To create the maturity curve, IT decision makers were asked  specific questions relating to their backup and recovery experience, strategy and infrastructure. Each section was scored out of 64 to give an overall maturity rating. The score was then multiplied by a scale factor to normalize the curve and give a total score out of 100 points. Once scored, these IT decision makers were divided into four even segments from a low to high score; Laggards (scoring 1-25), Evaluators (scoring 26-50), Adopters (scoring 51-75) and Leaders (scoring 76-100),” explains EMC.

The demographics of the report include 3300 IT decision makers in 3 regions spread across 24 countries. 575 respondents in the Americas, 1475 respondents in Europe, Middle East, and Africa, 1250 respondents Asia Pacific Japan and 125 in UAE were interviewed. The results underscore what every country must do to be confident their data is safe.

The survey revealed that 62 respondents percent believe that big data, hybrid cloud, mobile devices, is ‘difficult’ or ‘very difficult’ to protect. It also pointed out that 87% of businesses are behind the curve for data protection maturity and 71% of businesses are not fully confident of restoring their data. Results show that adopting advanced data protection tools lead to reduced data loss.

Detailed indices can be accessed here. while for individual countries is available on the EMC website.

Follow @DataconomyMedia

(image credit: twingly)