Big data in recent years has been gaining more importance and acceptance on both personal and  commercial levels. From your personal cloud through your smartphones, tablets and laptops to commercial data storage solutions for businesses today, big data is touted to be the next oil and it can be seen in the number of data and cloud solutions providers available in the market. With the massive amount of data stored and managed in today’s climate (and expected to grow even further), cyber attacks and disruptive events are on the rise in APJ (Asia Pacific & Japan) based on a recent Dell Technologies Research.

Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot revealed insights into organisations in APJ on their data management, on average managing 64% more data than they were a year ago. 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 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 organisations 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.

“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.”

Disruptions – Costly and rising at alarming rates. Here are some key summary points below:

• Organisations in APJ are now managing 13.31 petabytes (PB) of data
• 64% increase since the average of 8.13PB in 2018
• 693% increase since organisations were managing 1.68PB in 2016
• 84% of organisations in 2019, compared to 80% in 2019, suffered a disruptive event in last 12 months
• Additional 70% fear their organisation will experience a disruptive event in next 12 months
• Grave concern in finding: Organisations using more than 1 data protection vendor are almost 4X more vulnerable to a cyber incident.
• Average cost of downtime surged by 61% from 2018 to 2019
• Estimated total cost of USD$794,308 in 2019, up from USD$494,869 in 2018
• Estimated cost of data loss increased from USD$939,703 to USD$1,301,524 in 2019 on average

Emerging technologies challenge data protection solutions

Organisations are also adopting new or emerging technologies into their digital landscape, the top five investments are cloud-native applications (64%), software-as-a-service (Saas) applications (58%), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) (50%), 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (49%) and Internet of Things/end point (45%).

• 75% of respondents believe these emerging technologies create more data protection complexity.
• 72% state that emerging technologies pose a risk to data protection
• 77% 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%)
• Recovering data from a data loss incident (66%)
• Meeting compliance with regional data governance regulations (65%)
• Meeting backup and recovery service level objectives (60%)

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%), hybrid cloud (38%) and private cloud (36%) as deployment environments for newer applications such as these. Also, 76% 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% citing public cloud as their approach for managing and protecting data created in edge locations.

With the recent COVID-19 virus situation causing huge impacts to the world economy, how we work and live, working from home is a possible and accepted working solution in the near future as the business and working environments transformed and evolved from this crisis. While it might not directly impact or used extensively by personal daily users, the importance of data and cybersecurity will only rise in the years to come, for both commercial and personal sectors.

If you are a business owner, tapping on the new age digital economy and digital transformation, data storage, data protection and cybersecurity would definitely be of interest to you and your business. If you would like to know more, please visit Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot for more information and in-depth research findings.

This article written Dell Technologies Data Protection President Beth Phalen – “Data Protection Complexity – The Enemy of Innovation” is worth a read too.

Most people I reckon, on a personal level, underestimate the amount of data they have and kept inside their smartphone, portable hard disk drive, personal cloud drive etc. On the commercial front, it’s even much bigger. The value of data is huge and only going to get even bigger, data is an integral component that encompasses all industries.

Remember to back up your data and keep your data safe, whether it’s your personal or work/business data.

* Information and picture courtesy of Dell Technologies and BCW *