Enterprises increasingly leveraging endpoint data for security investigations

Code42 confirmed how critical it is for organizations to access and leverage endpoint data for additional uses above and beyond backup and recovery. Among 155 IT professionals and business decision-makers surveyed on the show floor at VMworld U.S. 2017, security investigations, eDiscovery and device migrations to Windows 10 were identified as the top uses for endpoint data.

“The findings of this survey reinforce a trend we have been seeing with our own customer base, from first wanting strictly data backup solutions to wanting to use that data for new strategic services and initiatives,” said Rob Juncker, senior vice president of product development at Code42. “With the evolving threat landscape, we’ve also seen an explosion in attack vectors that target user and corporate data. What started as a basic endpoint data backup and recovery market for lost or stolen laptops has evolved into a robust data services industry.”

Key findings include:

• Endpoints, such as laptops and desktops, are increasingly becoming a more important data source to the enterprise: 43 percent of organizations store between 50-100 percent of their data on endpoints. The percentage is even greater in the higher education sector, with 81 percent storing between 50-100 percent of their data on endpoints.
• The majority of companies (65 percent) are leveraging their endpoint data for tasks beyond backup, such as security investigations, eDiscovery, analytics and device migration.
• Of these services, security investigations are the most prevalent use for endpoint data (55 percent), followed closely by device migration (53 percent) and eDiscovery (47 percent).
• When asked what they would most want to use endpoint data for, security investigations (45 percent) was number one, followed closely by device migration (44 percent) and ransomware recovery (43 percent).
• Fifty-three percent believe endpoint data is extremely valuable to their organization.
• Sixty-three percent of respondents say they would be very concerned or concerned if their organization did not use endpoint data for additional services such as analytics, security, recovery, migration and eDiscovery.

This year has already seen multiple global ransomware outbreaks, combined with the largest data-exfiltration events in history. As more and more data, including intellectual property, is stored on endpoints, backup and recovery coupled with services such as analytics, security and eDiscovery have become mission critical for organizations.