KUALA LUMPUR: Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot reveals that organisations in Asia Pacific and Japan on average are managing 64 per cent more data than they were a year ago.
With this surge in data come inherent challenges. The vast majority (77 per cent) of respondents reported their current data protection solutions would not meet all of their future business needs.
The Snapshot, a follow-on to the biennial Global Data Protection Index, globally surveyed 1,000 IT decision makers across 15 countries at public and private organisations with more than 250 employees about the impact these challenges and advanced technologies have on data protection readiness. Of the 1000 IT decision makers, one fourth were from Asia Pacific and Japan.
The regional findings also show positive progress as an increasing number of organisations in APJ – 75 per cent in 2019, an increase of one per cent from 2018 – see their data as valuable and are currently extracting value or plan to in the future.
“Data is the lifeblood of business and the key to an organisation’s digital transformation,” said Beth Phalen, president, Dell Technologies Data Protection.
“As we enter the next data decade, resilient, reliable and modern data protection strategies are essential in helping businesses make smarter, faster decisions and combat the effects of costly disruptions.”
“The exponential data growth combined with increasing data value is creating opportunities but also new risks as organisations grapple with how to reliably and sustainably protect their information,” said Alex Lei, Vice President, Data Protection Solutions, Asia Pacific & Japan, Dell Technologies.
“As the value of an enterprise’s data increases, the cost of data lost increases substantially. In 2020 and beyond, organisations that leverage comprehensive data management and protection capabilities across their multi-platform and multi-cloud environments, will be prepared to effectively mitigate emerging risks, accelerate innovation, reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and optimise business outcomes.”
COSTLY DISRUPTIONS RISE AT ALARMING RATES
According to the study, organisations in APJ are now managing 13.31 petabytes (PB) of data, a 64 per cent increase since the average 8.13PB in 2018, and a 693 per cent increase since organisations were managing 1.68PB in 2016. The largest threat to all this data seems to be the growing number of disruptive events, from cyber-attacks to data loss to systems downtime. The majority of organisations (84 per cent in 2019 compared to 80 per cent in 2018) suffered a disruptive event in the last 12 months. And, an additional 70 per cent fear their organisation will experience a disruptive event in the next 12 months.
Even more concerning is the finding that organisations using more than one data protection vendor are almost four times more vulnerable to a cyber incident that prevents access to their data (42 per cent of those using two or more vendors versus 11 per cent of those using only one vendor).
But, the use of multiple data protection vendors is on the rise with 83 per cent of organisations choosing to deploy data protection solutions from two or more providers, up 25 percentage points since 2016.
The cost of disruption is also increasing at an alarming rate. The average cost of downtime in the last 12 months surged by 61 per cent from 2018 to 2019, resulting in an estimated total cost of US$794,308 (about RM3.5 mil) in 2019, an increase of approximately RM1.3 mil from 2018.
The estimated cost of data loss also increased from US$939,703 in 2018 to about US$1.3 mil in 2019 on average. These costs are significantly higher for those organisations using more than one data protection vendor – nearly four times higher downtime-related costs and almost twelve times higher data loss costs, on average.
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES CHALLENGE DATA PROTECTION SOLUTIONS
As emerging technologies continue to advance and shape the digital landscape, organisations are learning how to use these technologies for better business outcomes. The study reports that almost all APJ respondents’ organisations are making some level of investment in newer or emerging technologies, with the top five being: cloud-native applications (64 per cent); software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications (58 per cent); artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) (50 per cent); 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (49 per cent); and Internet of Things/end point (45 per cent).
Yet, 75 per cent of respondents believe these emerging technologies create more data protection complexity while 72 per cent state that emerging technologies pose a risk to data protection. More than half of those using newer or emerging technologies are struggling to find adequate data protection solutions for these technologies, including:
l 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (75 per cent)
l AI and ML platforms (72 per cent)
l Cloud-native applications (64 per cent)
l IoT and end point (59 per cent)
l Robotic process automation (56 per cent)
The study also found that 77 per cent of respondents believe their organisations’ existing data protection solutions will not be able to meet all future business challenges. Respondents shared a lack of confidence in the following areas:
Recovering data from cyber-attacks (70 per cent)
Recovering data from a data loss incident (66 per cent)
Meeting compliance with regional data governance regulations (65 per cent)
Meeting backup and recovery service level objectives (60 per cent)
DATA PROTECTION JOINS FORCES WITH CLOUD
Businesses are taking a combination of cloud approaches when deploying new business applications and protecting workloads such as containers and cloud-native and SaaS applications. The findings show that APJ respondents’ organisations prefer public cloud/SaaS (46 per cent), hybrid cloud (38 per cent) and private cloud (36 per cent) as deployment environments for newer applications such as these.
Also, 76 per cent of organisations surveyed say it is mandatory or extremely important for data protection providers to protect cloud-native applications.
As more data moves to, through and around edge environments, many respondents say cloud-based backups are preferred, with 60% citing private cloud and 59 per cent citing public cloud as their approach for managing and protecting data created in edge locations.
“These findings prove that data protection needs to be central to a company’s business strategy,” said Phalen. “As the data landscape grows more complex, organisations need nimble, sustainable data protection strategies that can scale in a multi-platform, multi-cloud world.”