Businesses in APJ witnessed greater average cost of data loss compared to global counterparts

The Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot reveals that organizations in Asia Pacific and Japan, except China, on average are managing 64% more data than they were a year ago. With this surge in data comes inherent challenges. The vast majority (Global: 81% and APJ: 77%) of respondents reported their current data protection solutions will 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 organizations with 250+ employees about the impact these challenges and advanced technologies have on data protection readiness.

Of the 1000 IT decision makers, a fourth were from Asia Pacific and Japan. The regional findings also show positive progress as an increasing number of organizations in APJ – 75% in 2019, up from 74% in 2018 – see their data as valuable and are currently extracting value or plan to in the future (vis-à-vis Global 80% in 2019, up from 74% in 2018).

“The exponential data growth combined with increasing data value is creating opportunities but also new risks as organizations grapple with how to reliably and sustainably protect their information,” said Alex Lei, VP, 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, organizations 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 optimize business outcomes.”

Ripu Bajwa, Director and GM, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, said:  "As India transitions towards a digital economy, organizations have been realizing that their existing data protection solutions may not able to sufficient to meet their future business needs,” said "Moreover, as we enter next data decade, Indian organizations will increasingly look to deploy diverse cloud environments and platforms.

"To ensure that their data is well-protected, compliant and secure, they will require a robust data protection portfolio to enable them to eliminate data protection complexity, mitigate the risk of data loss and downtime. At Dell Technologies, through our comprehensive and innovative portfolio we are well-positioned to address the ever-changing data protection needs of our customers’.”

Costly disruptions rise at alarming rates
According to the study, organizations in APJ are now managing 13.31 petabytes (PB) of data, a 64% increase since the average 8.13PB in 2018, In comparison to this, globally, organizations are managing 13.53 PB data, a nearly 40% increase since the average 9.70 PB in 2018.

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 organizations (APJ: 84% in 2019 vis-à-vis Global: 82% in 2019) suffered a disruptive event in the last 12 months. And, an additional 70% of APJ respondents (Globally: 68%) fear their organization will experience a disruptive event in the next 12 months.

Even more concerning is the finding that APJ organizations using more than one data protection vendor are almost four times more vulnerable to a cyber-incident that prevents access to their data ((APJ: 42% of those using two or more vendors versus 11% of those using only one vendor; Globally: 39% of those using two or more vendors versus 20% of those using only one vendor). But, the use of multiple data protection vendors is on the rise with 83% of APJ organizations (Global: 80%) choosing to deploy data protection solutions from two or more providers.

The cost of disruption is also increasing at an alarming rate. The average cost of downtime in the last 12 months surged by 61% from 2018 to 2019 (Global: 54%), resulting in an estimated total cost of $794,308 USD in 2019, up from $494,869 USD in 2018 (Global: $810,018 in 2019). The estimated APJ cost of data loss also increased from $939,703 USD in 2018 to $1,301,524 USD (Globally: $1,013,075 in 2019) in 2019 on average. These costs are significantly higher for those APJ organizations 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, organizations are learning how to use these technologies for better business outcomes. The study reports that almost all APJ respondents’ organizations are making some level of investment in newer or emerging technologies, with the top five being:

* Cloud-native applications (APJ: 64% & Global: 58%)
* Software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications (APJ: 58% & Global: 51%)
* Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) (APJ: 50% & Global 53%)
* 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (APJ: 49% & Global: 49%)
* Internet of Things/end point (APJ: 45% & Global: 36%)

Yet, three-quarters (APJ: 75% & Global: 71%) of respondents believe these emerging technologies create more data protection complexity while 72% of APJ respondents state (Global: 61%) 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:

* 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (APJ: 75% & Global: 67%)
* AI and ML platforms (APJ: 72% & Global: 64%)
* Cloud-native applications (APJ: 64% & Global: 60%)
* IoT and end point (APJ: 59% & Global: 59%)
* Robotic process automation (APJ: 56% & Global: 56%)

The study also found that 77% of APJ respondents (Global: 81%) believe their organizations’ 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 (APJ: 70% & Global: 69%)
* Recovering data from a data loss incident (APJ: 66% & Global: 64%)
* Meeting compliance with regional data governance regulations (APJ: 65% & Global: 62%)
* Meeting backup and recovery service level objectives (APJ: 60% & Global: 62%)

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’ organizations prefer public cloud/SaaS (APJ: 46% & Global: 43%), hybrid cloud (APJ: 38% & Global: 42%) and private cloud (APJ: 36% & Global: 39%) as deployment environments for newer applications such as these. Also, 76% of APJ organizations surveyed (Global: 85%) 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 (Global: 62%) and 59% citing public cloud (Global: 49%) as their approach for managing and protecting data created in edge locations.