The Global Data Protection Index was an annual EMC benchmarking exercise — surveying enterprise IT decision-makers across 24 countries on the cost of data loss, downtime and recovery maturity. Design challenge: take a long, dense report and surface five executive-level takeaways in a single global infographic, plus a regional series of “how does my market compare” cuts for press use.
The architecture was layered. A headline number (cost of data loss in absolute terms, year-on-year) sat at the top. Below it, a maturity-scale visualisation classified countries into four bands by how prepared they were for modern data protection threats. The bottom layer broke the maturity ranking into specific contributing factors — backup frequency, ransomware exposure, recovery time objectives.
What worked editorially
- The four-band maturity scale was deliberately chosen to give every regional press story a clean angle — “X falls behind global average” or “Y leads on backup maturity.”
- The cost-of-loss number at the top was sized for executive attention spans; everything else was for the analyst download.
- Year-on-year comparison was the single most important framing for an annual benchmark — the visualisation made the trend the hero, not just the absolute numbers.
If you’re commissioning similar work today
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