Companies have a false sense of confidence in their backup solutions

The latest results from the Databarracks annual Backup and Recovery survey indicate that overall, 91% of companies claim to be confident in their backup solution. Upon further investigation, 74% of those who do not use encryption or replication and do not take backups offsite are confident despite skipping these steps.

Furthermore, 67% still consider their backup solution to be secure even though they do not keep or check backup logs and do not test their restores to ensure that they are working properly.

The survey also reveals that 27% of companies’ data loss is caused by human error, 26% from hardware failure, and 19% from software failure. Previous reports from 2006 indicated that hardware failure caused the majority of data loss at 61%, while human error only accounted for 2%.
 
Oscar Arean, Databarracks’ Technical Support Manager speculates that:

This change in causes of data loss can possibly be attributed to improvements in software and hardware resiliency in the last two years which has reduced the number of hardware and software failures affecting computers, changing the way these threats need to be addressed in business continuity and disaster recovery plans moving forward.

The Data Health Check Survey is the largest and most comprehensive survey in the industry focused purely on backup and recovery technologies and practices. So far, it has been answered by 500 companies with strong representation across all industry sectors including Banking and Finance, IT, Education, and Engineering. The data gathered spans a variety of topics including virtualisation, business continuity plans, restores, backup policies, data retention regulations, and other associated areas. 

You can check a sample report with detailed statitics over here.