Data: The importance of Protecting this Invaluable Commodity in the Digital Economy

Our recent Dell EMC Global Data Protection Index revealed that there is not a one-size-fits-all-solution and companies are looking to work with one, or a small group, of technology partners to build a data protection solution. In APJ, we saw that 99 percent of companies are now leveraging the public cloud as part of their data protection infrastructure.

Business leaders know that a robust data protection strategy is one of the cornerstones of long term business success. Ensuring you have a solution that can protect your business today must also be balanced with the ability to scale and flex for your future needs. In APJ, 63 percent of organisations acknowledge the importance of scalablity options for data protection solutions in a public cloud environment and 44 percent are using cloud-enabled, on-premises data protection software toprotect their public cloud workloads.

Drive data protection strategies for organisational profitability and long-term data health

In a connected world, downtime as well as data loss can have a huge impact and in some cases, cripple businesses.

The Dell EMC Global Data Protection Index survey shows that 8 in 10 organisations in APJ have experienced a disruption in activities due to data breaches in the past 12 months, and 32 percent experienced irreparable data loss, nearly double the amount (15 percent) than in 2016.

In the last 12 months, organisations in the region that have lost data have forgone an astounding of 2.04TB, which had a price tag of nearly one million dollars (US$939,703)!

Organisations must reiterate the importance of data and file back-up not just in the cloud, but also on physical devices.

Prevalence of emerging technologies is driving data-intensive workloads

IDC predicts that data created in Asia-Pacific will increase from 5.9 zettabytes in 2018 to 33.8 zettabytes in 2025, representing 19.3 percent of all global data. Compounding this increase is the adoption of IoT, AI/ML and 5G technologies which are all incredibly data heavy putting pressure across the network, from the edge, to the core and to the cloud. This explosion of data comes with the added complexity that it must all be moved, stored, analysed, and most importantly, protected. However, nearly half (43 percent) of organisations in APJ have admitted that new technologies such as AI/ML are areas which they are struggling to find suitable data protection solutions for.

Organisations are already making big investments in new technologies and the race is on to ensure that their IT infrastructure can be modernised to support and protect these new workloads. There is no doubt that data is the rocket fuel that will drive the next level of innovation in our society. Our ability to harness, store, share, analyse and most importantly, protect this data, will be the difference between companies leading the industry and those who fall behind the curve.