Singapore ranks fourth in EMC's Global Data Protection Index

EMC has revealed that data loss and downtime cost Singapore enterprises US$1 billion in the last twelve months, compared to the average of US$34 billion across the Asia-Pacific and Japan region. The company says global data losses are up by 400% since 2012 and that 70% of Singapore organisations are still not fully confident in their ability to recover after a disruption.

The 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 125 respondents from Singapore. The research exposes businesses’ ability to protect and restore data, the impact of adopting different protection strategies and the costs to business of data loss and downtime.

Singapore is in 4th position in terms of maturity of data protection approaches, after mainland China, Hong Kong and the Netherlands respectively. The US is in 5th place, and India ranks 6th.

PK Gupta, Senior Director and Chief Architect, EMC Data Protection and Availability Division, Asia Pacific and Japan, said it was interesting to see that the Asian markets in the top five are more mature in terms of data protection than the Netherlands and the US. 

"From the three Asian countries in the top five, Singapore companies are the most confident (70%) that they can recover fully their systems and data from all platforms, on-premise and off-premise in the event of a data loss incident. Hong Kong ranks second (66%), and (mainland) China third (54%). The most confident company globally is the Netherlands (72%)," he noted.

In terms of financial losses due to downtime and data losses, Gupta shared that the US suffers approximate losses of US$308 billion, while mainland China has an estimated US$125 billion in losses. The numbers for the Netherlands are US$4.2 billion, and US$2.2 billion for Hong Kong.

"Of course the estimated cost depends on the country size as well but it is interesting to see that China comes after the US, which shows that Asia’s biggest economy is cautious and that companies in China look at data protection very seriously. The interesting finding was that China ranked highest on Active-Active high availability data protection architecture which makes them leader of the pack," he said.

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 Singapore:

· Two thirds - 66% - of enterprises surveyed experienced data loss or downtime in the last 12 months

· The average business experienced more than three working days (27 hours) of unexpected downtime in the last 12 months

· Other commercial consequences of disruptions were loss of employee productivity (61%) and loss of revenue (42%)

The trend towards big data, mobile and the hybrid cloud are creating new challenges for data protection in Singapore. More than four in 10 (43%) businesses lack a disaster recovery plan for any of these workloads and only 6% have a plan for all three. In fact, 62% rated big data, mobile and hybrid cloud as being ‘difficult’ to protect. As almost a third (30%) of all primary data from businesses in Singapore is located in some form of cloud storage, it is at substantial risk. 

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 Singapore enterprises that had not deployed a continuous availability strategy were almost twice as likely to suffer data loss as those that had

· Those using three or more vendors to supply data protection solutions lost 13 times as much data as those who unified their data protection strategy around a single vendor

· Globally, those with three vendors were also likely to spend an average of US$3 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 (80%) of businesses in Singapore 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%)

“This research highlights the enormous monetary impact of unplanned downtime and data loss to businesses everywhere. With 62% of IT decision-makers interviewed feeling challenged to protect hybrid cloud, big data and mobile, it’s understandable that almost all of them lack the confidence that data protection will be able to meet future business challenges. We hope the global data protection index will prompt IT leaders to pause and reevaluate whether their current data protection solutions are in alignment with today’s business requirements as well as their long term goals,” said Guy Churchward, President, EMC Core Technologies.

“As businesses continue to struggle to protect their current workloads, the findings from this global study show that many enterprises in Singapore are still ill-prepared to face the protection challenges that come with emerging data storage technologies. With data protection technologies evolving in parallel with the challenges that are emerging, businesses in Singapore will find it easier to protect themselves by staying abreast of these developments and thinking strategically about data protection, in order to better prepare themselves from unplanned and costly incidents that may result in downtime and data loss,” added Eric Goh, Managing Director, EMC Singapore.

The complete findings are available here, and the global results infographic is here.

*Research was carried out independently by Vanson Bourne between August and September 2014. Respondents were IT decision makers from both private and public organisations with 250+ employees. There were a total of 3,300 respondents from 24 countries - 200 each from US, UK, France and Germany. The rest of the countries had 125 respondents each.

To create the maturity curve, IT decision-makers were asked specific questions relating to their backup and recovery experience, strategy and infrastructure. Each section was scored out of 64 to give an overall maturity rating. This score was then multiplied by a scaling factor to normalise the curve and give a total score out of 100 points. Once scored, these IT decision-makers were divided into four even segments from a low to high score; Laggards (scoring 1–25), Evaluators (scoring 26-50), Adopters (scoring 51-75) and Leaders (scoring 76-100).

Enterprises are defined as those companies employing more than 250 people. Figures based on company data from Dun & Bradstreet. Figures represents total estimated loss to enterprises within the 24 countries covered by the EMC research.

The average total loss per company is 2.33TB. This assumes an average email size of 100KB.

Images from the Singapore version of the infographic.