74% of Indian companies overwhelmed by data as security, sustainability challenges grow: Hitachi Vantara Study Shows

Nearly 74% of Indian companies are overwhelmed by the amount of data they manage and 75% are concerned their current infrastructure will be unable to adapt to meet their organization’s data needs, according to a new survey from Hitachi Vantara, the modern infrastructure, data management and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. The Hitachi Vantara Modern Data Infrastructure Dynamics Report also revealed that most companies expect their data needs to nearly double in the next two years, and that both protecting and managing that rapid growth of data in an actionable and sustainable way are further complicating efforts.

The company conducted the global survey of 1,288 C-level executives and IT decision makers, including 82 in India, to quantify the extent to which organizations are struggling to manage their data infrastructure in a secure and sustainable way. Key India findings include:

• Leaders say that data is their most valuable asset but are concerned about the security and resilience of their data infrastructure; 68% of leaders are concerned they cannot detect a data breach in time to protect data.
• 75% of leaders are concerned over whether their organization’s data infrastructure is resilient enough to recover data from ransomware attacks.
  • 21% of respondents admitted that important data was not backed up and 27% had experienced data inaccessibility due to storage outages.
• 76% of IT leaders currently measure their data center’s energy consumption; however, 28% acknowledged that their data infrastructure uses too much energy and 43% admitted their sustainability policies don’t address the impact of storing unused data.

“While 79% of the organisations stated that they stored every piece of data, on an average, 42% of it remains as ‘dark data’ or unused. This clearly highlights the lack of establishment of strategy and data infrastructure tools to leverage data with maximum efficiency,” stated Hemant Tiwari, Managing Director- India, Hitachi Vantara. “To stay ahead of the market, it is essential for businesses to proactively adopt infrastructure modernization techniques that offer greater agility, speed, reliability, embedded AI/ML and protection of data, while requiring significantly less space and energy.”

A Hybrid Cloud World

The study also shed light on the future of data storage, with the hybrid cloud model leveraging a mix of public/private cloud, co-location and on-premises expected to persist. For India business leaders, the study found data stored in an already established hybrid cloud with percentages of data center workloads located almost evenly between the public cloud (26%), private cloud (25%), on-premises (26%), and co-located/managed services (20%). Notably, public and private cloud are both expected to rise slightly to 28% in the coming two years with on-premises dropping to 22%.