Two-thirds of businesses are failing critical data control best practices, meaning their systems are potentially open to leaks.
Because of the growth of big data, companies are struggling to keep the information tracked, which in turn, makes it almost impossible to keep it safe too.
"The truth is most companies are have no idea how many copies of a given data set are floating around in their infrastructure or in the cloud," said Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Actifio.
"If you don't know how many copies you have you don't know where they are, and if you don't know where they are you can't tell who has access to them. Actifio gives customers a single system of record to take control of their secondary data, and more and more CIOs are taking a proactive approach to reduce the threat of exposure."
Other findings in the report revealed more than three quarters of companies don't mask their sensitive data when they are building or developing applications, leaving the systems and data contained within them open to hacks.
Unsurprisingly, the government performed best when it came to implementing data control policies, thanks to the nature of its information and policies in place, while the education sector is falling behind, despite being a highly sensitive industry.
"Our research clearly identified two major challenges faced by IT executives - the copy data proliferation problem and the copy data access problem," said Phil Goodwin, research director, Storage Systems and Software of IDC.
"Copy data is costly, and introduces risk when it needs to be accessed. Organisations need solutions that can automate copy data management and subsequently reduce risk and cost in the enterprise and public sector environments; manual efforts are simply insufficient."
