EMC Corporation announced the findings of a new global data protection study that reveals, data loss and downtime cost enterprises across the Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) region US$343 billion in the last twelve months. Global data loss is up by 400% since 2012 while, surprisingly, 73% of organizations in APJ are still not fully confident in their ability to recover after a disruption.
EMC Global Data Protection Index, conducted by Vanson Bourne, surveyed 3,300 IT decision makers from mid-size to enterprise-class businesses across 24 countries, including 1250 respondents from the APJ region between August and September 2014. 200 respondents each in the USA, UK, France and Germany and 125 respondents each in Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Turkey, UAE, Italy, Switzerland, The Netherlands, Australia, Japan, China, Korea, India, Singapore, Hong Kong, The Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia.
The good news is that the number of data loss incidents is decreasing overall. However, the volume of data lost during an incident is growing exponentially.
In the APJ region:
- 66% of enterprises surveyed experienced data loss or downtime in the last 12 months
- The average business experienced more than three working days (26 hours) of unexpected downtime in the last 12 months
- Other commercial consequences of disruptions were loss of employee productivity (51%) and delay in product and service development (42%)
Business trends, such as big data, mobile and hybrid cloud create new challenges for data protection across the APJ region:
- 55% of businesses lack a disaster recovery plan for any of these environments and just 4% have a plan for all three
- In fact, 64% rated big data, mobile and hybrid cloud as ‘difficult’ to protect
- With 30% of all primary data located in some form of cloud storage, this could result in substantial loss
Adopting advanced data protection technologies dramatically decreases the likelihood of disruption. And, many companies turn to multiple IT vendors to solve their data protection challenges. However, a siloed approach to deploying these can increase risks:
- The findings showed that enterprises in APJ that had not deployed a continuous availability strategy were twice as likely to suffer data loss as those that had
- Those using three or more vendors to supply data protection solutions lost almost 4 times as much data as those who unified their data protection strategy around a single vendor
- Those with three vendors were also likely to spend an average of US$1 million more on their data protection infrastructure compared to those with just one.
EMC Data Protection Index survey participants were awarded points based on their responses, ranking their data protection maturity in one of four categories.
- The vast majority – 83% of businesses in APJ rank in the bottom two categories for data protection maturity
- Globally, 14% rank ahead of the curve; 11% are classed as “Adopters” and 2% considered “Leaders”
- Of all the countries surveyed, China has the greatest number of companies ahead of the curve (30%) and the UAE the least (0%)
- Very large enterprises of more than 5,000 employees were twice as likely (24%) to be ahead of the curve than smaller enterprises of 250-449 employees (12%); companies in the U.S. and The Netherlands were the greatest vanguards outside of Asia Pacific and Japan (at 20% and 21% respectively)