83% of South East Asia Biz Unlikely to Recover Lost Data, Systems

EMC Corporation announced the results of The Disaster Recovery Survey 2012: South East Asia, which found that 83% of companies in the region are not very confident that they can fully recover systems or data in the event of a disaster, and that 74% of all organizations lost data or suffered systems downtime in the last 12 months.

The findings highlighted the need for backup transformation from antiquated technologies that are not suited for today’s data growth or availability expectations.

In fact, the research has shown that the causes of systems downtime are often the commonplace disruptions to IT, such as hardware failure or data corruption, rather than natural disasters or other major incidents.

Commissioned by EMC and conducted by independent research company Vanson Bourne, the survey looked at the state of backup and disaster recovery in the region to understand how well companies are prepared for data loss and systems downtime.

The research showed that it is not the extraordinary that creates problems, and it can take just a little to cause a lot of disruption, even something as simple as data corruption.

The three most common causes
of data loss and downtime are:

• Hardware failure: 60%
• Data corruption: 47%
• Loss of power: 44%

This compares to just 18% of respondents citing natural disasters as a cause of systems downtime or data loss, and 15% of respondents attributing systems downtime or data loss to employee sabotage. Regardless of the cause, 59% of organizations reviewed and changed their procedures for backup and recovery in response to an incident.

Furthermore, 46% of businesses increased their spending on backup and recovery after a disaster. This is against a backdrop where 29% of organizations surveyed did not feel they were spending enough on backup and recovery. On average, the research found that businesses across the region are spending 11.2% of their IT budgets on backup and recovery.

The study identified that there are measureable business impacts from systems downtime, with the top three cited as:

• Delay in product/service development: 43%
• Loss of revenue: 41%
• Loss of employee productivity: 39%

Systems failure resulted on average in two lost working days for the businesses in the survey. Based on an average eight hour working day, this is the equivalent of 32,000 man-hours for a company employing approximately 2,000 employees.

Additionally, each organization lost an average of 425GB of data during a 12 month period. Given that 1MB of data is approximately the equivalent of 25 email documents in size, losing 425GB of data would be the equivalent of losing 10.9 million emails.

Despite loss of revenue being rated as a major consequence of systems downtime, the research also revealed that many companies are not doing enough to protect essential customer data. 65% of organizations do not have a disaster recovery plan for their CRM systems, while only 22% of organizations who do have a disaster recovery plan for their applications would require their CRM applications to be up and running first following systems downtime.

Furthermore, businesses in Asia Pacific and Japan are failing to take advantage of insurance premium benefits that a comprehensive disaster recovery plan can engender. 53% of companies across the region are obliged by either insurance policies or regulatory requirements to have a disaster recovery plan in place.

More importantly, 40% of the organizations surveyed are offered reduced premiums by their insurance provider according to the strength of their IT systems backup/disaster recovery strategy.

However, 18% of organizations do not know if their insurance provider offers such reduced premiums – or they had never considered it at all – highlighting a missed opportunity for many businesses.

For backup and disaster recovery purposes, 38% of organizations still rely on tape. Looking at the operational cost associated with tape, organizations in the region spend on average more than $58,920 including transportation, storage, test and replacement of tape for the purposes of offsite disaster recovery.

Meanwhile, 38% of companies rely on outdated CD-ROM for backup storage. Surprisingly, 15% of organizations have an employee take a copy of their backup home with them for safekeeping.

However, 59% of businesses in the region are already using modern disk-based backup and recovery solutions. This trend looks set to increase, with 83% of tape-using organizations looking to move beyond tape.

The top three reasons cited
for this planned move are:

• Faster backups: 36%
• Speed of data recovery and system restores: 34%
• Durability (disk-based methods have a longer lifespan): 29%

Preparedness for routine disruption or more significant incidents starts with a next-generation backup approach that leverages disk with data deduplication and network based replication technologies.

The survey showed the reaction after disruption is to spend more on backup and recovery, but the damage is done in terms of time and money during a downtime as well as longer term damage to customer loyalty.

By raising the visibility of the most common problems facing companies today and the associated economic consequences, organizations can proactively review their own strategies for backup and recovery to ensure they can meet business requirements.