As the number of on-premise workloads being moved to the cloud continues to increase, the risks involved in storing sensitive business information outside the safety of the firewall are becoming more pronounced. A new survey of 1,037 enterprise technology professionals published by EMC Corp. subsidiary Spanning today reveals that nearly 80 percent have experienced some sort of data loss in their organizations’ software-as-a-service deployments.

User error emerged as the most frequently-cited reason both in the U.S. and the U.K, with over 40 percent of the respondents from each country saying that they’ve seen records accidentally get deleted when they were not supposed to be. Another 27 percent of American participants and 26 percent of their British peers blamed their data loss incidents on a worker overwriting files with bad information. In reality, such mistakes probably happen a lot more often than deletions, but they don’t always require administrative action to correct. Plus, the fact that an inaccurate CRM entry or marketing metric is potentially much harder to spot than a missing one likely means many cases that do necessitate the IT department’s attention go unnoticed.

Administrators share some of the blame too, with over 30 percent of the respondents also naming the difficulty of moving on-premise workloads to the cloud as a reason for data loss. On top of that, a quarter of U.S. participants and a fifth of the Britons revealed their organizations have had information compromised due to hacking, which is especially alarming given that Spanning’s poll only asked about incidents from the past 12 months. The problem is aggravated by the fact that many companies don’t have an effective mechanism in place for recovering from such breaches.

Nearly half of the U.S. respondents and 42 percent of those in the U.K said they trust their software-as-a-service providers with handling the task, while a similar number rely on manual backups. The latter camp is particularly vulnerable due to the risk of an administrator neglecting to make copies on a regular basis or overlooking a potential issue with the replication mechanism that might render the standby files unusable. Spanning believes that the results of the study show there’s a big market out there for its managed data protection service, which can automatically replicate records from an organization’s key software-as-a-service deployments to a remote location at set time intervals. But it’s not the only one competing for a slice of the pie.

The EMC subsidiary is facing competition from Backify Inc., eFolder Inc. and several other players that are all touting similar value propositions. And the rivalry in the cloud-to-cloud backup segment will only intensify over time as more organizations move to modernize their data protection processes.

Image via Geralt