Next Frontier of Opportunity for OEMs: Data Protection

Roughly two terabytes of lost data costs organizations nearly $1 million in one year, on average.

Imagine if your email provider had a major outage and your last 48 hours of emails were lost. Or your recent radiology scans vanished because the imaging repository crashed at your hospital.

Startling statistics

Alarming episodes of data loss happen more often than we think, as the annual Global Data Protection Index (GDPI), a survey commissioned by Dell Technologies, reveals. The research, which surveyed 2,200 decision makers from organizations with 250+ employees across 18 countries and 11 industries, reports some startling statistics:

◈ 2.13 terabytes of lost data costs organizations $995,613 over the last 12 months, on average.

◈ Only 33% reported high confidence that their organization could fully recover and meet Service Level Objectives (SLOs) from data loss.

◈ In the last 12 months, 76 percent of organizations experienced a disruption, and 27 percent experienced irreparable data loss, nearly double the 14 percent in 2016.

Huge opportunity for OEMs

What does this mean for OEMs and application providers? Opportunity. Data protection differentiates your offerings from competitors with premium business value and shields your brand from risk. Further, it can generate an incremental revenue stream by making data protection as a service via the cloud available to your customers.

The real cost of data loss

OEMs and application owners traditionally have steered clear of data protection since they view data as their customers’ responsibility. This can be shortsighted, particularly as data value and cost of data loss grow exponentially. According to the GDPI, 74% of organizations are monetizing data or investing in tools to do so. The high costs of non-compliance with regulations, brand damage from data loss or cybersecurity attacks, and rapid expansion of data-driven decisions, are driving this trend. Also, 96% of organizations that suffered data loss and/or unplanned systems downtime experienced productivity decreases, inability to provide essential services, product/service development delays, and revenue loss, among other outcomes.

Integrated solutions now available

Another data protection concern for OEMs is complexity. The good news is it’s easier than ever to deliver data protection to your customers. No longer do you need to cobble together multiple backup and replication solutions. Dell Technologies, for example, provides integrated data protection solutions that enable seamless backup, restore, deduplication, and management with a few clicks via the cloud, virtualized, physical, or on-premise environments. Dell Technologies OEM | Embedded & Edge Solutions works with partners to co-develop enhanced data protection services, such as the Teradata Backup, Archive and Recovery solution.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

The GDPI reports that 51% of respondents cannot find suitable data protection solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Other emerging technologies customers struggle to protect include IoT and robotics, among others. Again, this presents a big opportunity to add value to your solutions. New use cases and workloads fueled by AI/ML present unique challenges to OEMs.

New data challenges

Enormous amounts of data, be it from on-premises analytics or edge sensors, are required for ongoing calculations. Previously this amount of historical data would be discarded or at best, archived. What’s more, these petabytes of data are a critical part of your IP and likely the source of future revenue opportunities.

Everyone agrees that production data is valuable and must be protected but how will you handle this new data challenge? As enterprise data points expand from data centers to automated oil rigs to robotics-driven factories to sensor-equipped retail stores and beyond, your customers require multi-pronged data protection solutions that work seamlessly with their applications and core, cloud, and edge environments.

Sizing the opportunity

To help assess this opportunity, we suggest downloading the GDPI for a detailed view, including global and regional infographics.

Making data protection a primary solution design consideration, just as you treat storage, servers, and networking, is a high-reward opportunity to offer differentiated value, create more revenue, and help your customers grow and succeed.