New Delhi, July 5 (IANS): Indian businesses lost over $1 million from data loss and downtime in the last 12 months, a survey by EMC Corporation -- the world's largest data storage multinational -- revealed on Tuesday.

"Organisations are getting better at protecting themselves against traditional threats to data but new threats mean that despite progress, more businesses are losing data than before," said Ripu Bajwa, Country Manager-Data Protection Solutions at EMC in a statement

Highlighting the growing challenges of protecting data, the research commissioned by EMC and carried out by technology market research provider Vanson Bourne revealed that average cost of data loss to Indian organisations was more than $114,000 while globally, the costs was more than $914,000. 

In India, 46 per cent of organisations suffered unplanned system downtime and/or data loss due to an external or internal security breach, the study found.

While majority (over 80 per cent) of businesses think that their organisation's current data protection solution will not enable them to meet all future business challenges, Cloud is changing the game for Indian organisations when it comes to data protection.

In India, on average, 34 per cent of organisations have their IT environment in public Cloud and more than 60 per cent organisations believe that not all their data stored in the Cloud is protected.

"Our customers are facing a rapidly evolving data protection landscape on a number of fronts, whether it's to protect modern cloud computing environments or to shield against devastating cyber attacks. Our research shows that many businesses are unaware of the potential impact and are failing to plan for them, which is a threat in itself," noted David Goulden, CEO, EMC Information Infrastructure.

Nearly half (54 per cent) of organisations surveyed in India were not very confident they could fully recover their systems or data in the event of data loss or unexpected systems downtime. 

Moreover, only 42 per cent of respondents said they were confident that their solutions would be able to keep pace with the faster performance and new capabilities of flash storage. 

Ransomware is dramatically raising the stakes when it comes to cyber security. 

"We're moving from theft, which is costly, to potential catastrophe. There are forces at play now that aren't satisfied with just stealing your money; they want to destroy your entity. You can either start taking these threats seriously or start looking for a hole to crawl into," Goulden added.

To address the threats, EMC has announced to launch a new "Isolated Recovery Solutions" line to help organisations "air gap" a protection instance of their data from the networked enterprise.

The EMC-sponsored global research survey covered IT decision-makers at 2,200 organisations to index data protection maturity, threats and trends.