EMC Corporation has announced the findings of a new global data protection study that reveals, data loss and downtime cost India enterprises $54 billion in the last twelve months. Global data loss is up by 400% since 2012 while, surprisingly, 70% of India organizations 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 125 respondents from India.
According the study, finds that 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.
About the impact of data loss and downtime, the study finds that in India, 70% of enterprises surveyed experienced data loss or downtime in the last 12 months. The average business experienced more than 2.5 working days (23 hours) of unexpected downtime in the last 12 months. Other commercial consequences of disruptions were loss of employee productivity (58%), and loss of revenue (50%).
The study also finds, business trends, such as big data, mobile and hybrid cloud create new challenges for data protection in India. About 43% of businesses lack a disaster recovery plan for any of these environments and just 9% have a plan for all three. In fact, 64% rated big data, mobile and hybrid cloud as ‘difficult’ to protect. With 39% 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 study says.
Across APJ, the findings showed that enterprises that had not deployed a continuous availability strategy were almost twice as likely to suffer data loss as those that had. In India, those using three or more vendors to supply data protection solutions lost 7.9 times as much data as those who unified their data protection strategy around a single vendor. In India, 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.
“As businesses continue to struggle to protect their current workloads, the findings from this global study show that many enterprises in India 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 India 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,” Surajit Sen, Country Manager – Data Protection & Availability Division, EMC India.