Six in 10 businesses experience data loss

A survey has found that six in 10 organisations reported experiencing at least one data loss from their Oracle(R) business system, and 18% have had more than five losses in the past two years, Market Watch reports.

These are key findings from a recent Oracle OpenWorld survey, conducted by Kroll Ontrack, a provider of information management, data recovery and legal technologies products and services.

The survey yielded feedback from 733 IT professionals on Oracle system data loss frequency and remediation practices. Data loss can occur in any and every business system as a result of corruption, human error, or hardware or software failure.

However, when estimating the risk level associated with an inability to retain data from a lost Oracle database, 79% of organisations report 'no risk or fair risk', which inevitably leads to an increased tendency to neglect data loss risk from Oracle database, log or backup corruption; Oracle ASM corruption; deleted Oracle databases, logs or backups; file system corruption; and RAID and other storage/server hardware failures.

Further, 58% of organisations reported taking more than a business day of downtime to recover from their data loss.

According to Ontrack Data Recovery, data recovery needs to change, as current processes take too much time, something businesses do not have to spare.

George Crump, lead analyst of Storage Switzerland, writing for Information Week, says true data recovery is all about bringing information and applications back online quickly and reliably.

Currently, he suggested that if a hard drive or server has failed, businesses often have to wait for a replacement part and then for that to be configured and reinstalled, all of which takes time, which many firms cannot afford.