The latest study from MeriTalk reveals that the federal government is not doing enough to keep its data safe. The report, entitled “Disaster Unpreparedness,” indicates that the majority of government agencies are struggling with data protection, backup and disaster recovery.

Only eight percent of the federal IT professionals who participated in MeriTalk’s survey said they were ‘completely confident’ they could restore 100 percent of the data stored on their systems. Just over half said they could successfully recover all the data stored on their users’ mobile devices, and the overwhelming majority complained that their disaster recovery solutions are not tested frequently enough.

Another alarming finding is that only one in three government agencies plan to supplement their aging on-premise backup systems with cloud solutions. This suggests that the majority of federal IT departments have no plans to address security risks associated with Big Data, cloud computing and BYOD.

Guy Churchward, the President of Backup and Recovery Systems at EMC, warned that traditional backup is ‘broken’ in his latest interview on theCube. He told John Furrier and Dave Vellante that “everything goes wrong” in legacy environments where data resides in isolated silos that are difficult to manage and even harder to protect.

Solutions such as EMC’s ViPR eliminate much of the risk in the storage layer by centralizing and automating key processes, but government agencies are slow to adopt technology solutions due to their unique security and compliance requirements. Thankfully, their private sector peers don’t face the same constraints.

Last month, endpoint data protection provider Druva rolled out a major upgrade for its flagship cloud offering to meet enterprise users’ needs more effectively. InSync 5.2 features automatic system and application settings backup, admin activity tracking and a simplified recovery interface.