Dell Technologies’ Global Data Protection Index 2024 found a vast majority (81%) of surveyed IT leaders agree that emerging technologies —such as artificial intelligence (AI), IoT and edge — pose a risk to data protection, but very few of them (8%) have fully implemented a zero-trust security architecture.

The report was based on interviews with 1,500 IT and IT security decision-makers from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) and China.

The 2024 report, the first Dell Global Data Protection Index to address the impact of generative AI (genAI), showed more than half (52%) of respondents said genAI will bolster their organization's cybersecurity posture. However, this optimism is tempered by the 27% who believe that genAI might initially give an advantage to cybercriminals. Twenty percent of the respondents said the technology will both increase the threat of cyberattacks and also strengthen the cybersecurity posture, which could offset each other.

These IT leaders are also concerned about the new cybersecurity challenges that genAI could create. A whopping 88% of them agree that genAI is likely to create large amounts of new data that will need to be protected and secured. And another 88% say genAI will increase the value of certain types of data, requiring higher levels of data protection.

While the adoption of multicloud strategies continues to grow and become the preferred way to deploy and update applications, data protection in these environments remains a significant concern.

Notably, more than three-quarters (79%) of surveyed decision-makers lack confidence in their organization's ability to protect data across public clouds, with 40% citing data security as a key challenge.

“Continuing to increase confidence in multicloud data protection and cyber security is critical, considering the majority (more than 56%) of respondents believe these are the most important capabilities for enabling operations,” Rob Emsley, director of product marketing for data protection at Dell Technologies, wrote in a blog post.

The report sheds light on another concerning trend that more than half (60%) of the respondents lack confidence in their organizations meeting backup and recovery service level objectives, and 65% doubt their ability to fully recover systems or data in the event of a data loss incident.

About three-quarters of them are worried that their organizations’ existing data protection measures may not effectively handle ransomware threats.

“As organizations increasingly turn to public cloud solutions, implement hybrid working models and experiment with genAI, the criticality of data protection is more evident than ever,” Emsley noted.

Despite these challenges, the adoption of zero-trust security architectures remains sluggish.

Only 8% of IT leaders said their organizations have fully implemented zero trust, while 21% are actively deploying it and 20% are in the planning phase. However, about 7% of them admitted to having no understanding of zero-trust security, indicating a gap in embracing this approach to data protection.