Forty-two percent of companies that use Microsoft Exchange or SharePoint experienced a data loss in the last year.
That was one of the findings in a study released last week by Kroll Ontrack, a maker of software for searching and recovering lost, deleted and archived data.
In addition, 25 percent of the Exchange and SharePoint users interviewed by Kroll’s surveyors said they’d experienced multiple data losses over the past year, while 38 percent said they had experienced n0 losses during the period.
The kind of data loss most experienced by the survey respondents was a “level three occasional disruption” (37 percent). Meanwhile, 20 percent characterized their data loss as a “level one severe disruption” and 18 percent pegged their loss as a “level four minimal disruption.”
Recovering from the losses cost the companies both time and money, according to the survey. Some 59 percent of respondents said it took them at least half a day to recover from their Exchange and SharePoint data losses. A smaller number of those surveyed (14 percent) revealed that they lost multiple days because of a data loss and an even smaller number (five percent) said they’d never recovered from the loss. Twenty-five percent said they had lost less than two hours because of a data loss.
The most common method for recovering lost data used by the organizations in the survey was to use an existing backup (26 percent), followed by leveraging an in-house capability (21 percent), re-creating the data (18 percent) and using some kind of data recovery software tool (14 percent).
More than half (65 percent) the respondents estimated that the cost their organizations attributed to the data loss was less than $50,000. A very small number of the companies surveyed (three percent) calculated that their data losses cost them more than $1 million, while two percent of the organizations estimated that the financial impact of their data loss was between $500,000 and $1 million, six percent between $100,000 and $500,000 and 13 percent between $50,000 and $100,000.
According to Kroll, the survey sample consisted of 326 respondents, including IT personnel (57 percent), engineers (17 percent), salespeople (14 percent), marketers (four percent) and others (eight percent).
While the critics of email seem to be getting louder, they don’t seem to be having much of an impact on the growth of the technology. According to one prognostication, the number of worldwide email accounts will increase by one billion between 2011 and 2015, from 3.1 billion to 4.1 billion accounts. Those growth numbers suggest that email will continue to maintain its importance for some time to come, as will Exchange and SharePoint.
“For many businesses, regardless of size, the use of email means everything from simple internal communications or vital customer sale calls to invoicing and billing,” Kroll Vice President of Product Development Jim Reinert observed in a statement. “Email — and Exchange — is involved at every level of business life. Losing that information is debilitating, putting a great deal of recovery and restoration requests and thus burden on IT.”
He maintained that his company’s survey shows how challenging data loss events in key applications like Exchange and SharePoint can be for IT departments.
“A single data loss and recovery event can escalate very quickly and become extremely expensive to an organization,” he said.
More than 40% of Exchange shops lost data in last year
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