Datacentre glitches expose data loss risks

Just under half (46%) of businesses say they have suffered data losses in the past 12 months because their datacentre provider has let them down.

The Data loss and downtime are putting hybrid and edge computing strategies at risk report, based on a survey of 200 IT decision-makers, was conducted online by Sapio Research in August 2018 for Volta Data Centres.

It reported that outages and data loss are due to a variety of factors, ranging from network glitches to human error, failed UPSs and inadequate maintenance.

The research found that 29% of respondents had suffered one or two events of data loss because of their datacentre provider letting them down – with 18% saying they had suffered data losses on three or more times during the past 12 months.

Jon Arnold, managing director at Volta Data Centres, said: “Outages and data loss can be due to a variety of factors, such as network glitches, human error or inadequate maintenance, but whatever the reason, organisations need to be taking a far more robust approach to datacentre due diligence.

“Where is the guarantee of 100% uptime? What power resilience is in place? How many different connectivity options are available – and do they run across different networks for greater contingency? These are all questions businesses need to ask when choosing datacentre providers – or face the risk of more downtime.”

The survey also showed that 35% of organisations still locate IT assets mainly on-premise, with 29% shifting mainly to the cloud.

Hybrid model was identified as a major trend. Just under one-third (30%) of organisations now choose to deploy a mixture of hybrid across all locations, and 69% of IT decision-makers are likely to deploy hybrid clouds over the next five years, the survey showed.

According to Volta Data Centres, one of the biggest contributors to the evolution of hybrid strategies is the growth of edge computing, which handles computing applications, data and services away from centralised nodes to the logical extremes of a network.

The research revealed that edge computing is already well established in the datacentre market – especially with larger companies. Whereas 45% of firms overall are already using edge datacentres, this rises to 68% of companies with 100-199 employees, 59% of those with 200-499 and 57% of those with 500 or more.