£10.5bn is lost every year in the UK from data loss and downtime, according to a global study commissioned by EMC Corporation, a data storage firm.
The amount of data loss is now five times what it was since 2012, and four-fifths of organisations were not fully assured that they could recover data after a disruption.
Guy Churchward, president of core technologies at EMC, said: "This research highlights the enormous monetary impact of unplanned downtime and data loss to businesses everywhere.
"With 62% of IT decision-makers interviewed feeling challenged to protect hybrid cloud, big data and mobile, it’s understandable that almost all of them lack the confidence that data protection will be able to meet future business challenges."
By EMC’s measure 87% of the firms assessed are "behind the curve" when it comes to data protection maturity, meaning that they have inadequate measures in place to defend or recover from data loss.
This was corroborated by those surveyed, with 80% saying they did not believe their data protection solutions could meet future business challenges.
Kelly Brown, a senior director of marketing at EMC added that " the reality is probably more extreme" than result suggest, due to a reluctance to divulge problems even in anonymised surveys such as this one, which covered companies across the world with at least 250 workers.
