39% of AsiaPac Organizations Expecting 20-50% Data Growth in 2014 – IDC/CommVault

CommVault Systems, Inc. released findings from an IDC Corp.‘s survey and whitepaper titled, Driving Smart Data Management, which demonstrates that the increasing cost of collecting and analysing today’s business data is placing corporations in the AsiaPac region at risk for litigation through compliance breaches, and is negatively impacting their competitive potential in the wider market.

Commissioned by CommVault, the whitepaper was based on a survey of more than 500 IT executives across AsiaPac.

Key findings include:

• 72% of the respondents consider the exponential growth and complexity of data to be a top data management challenge.
• 70% of executives said that their financial or operational business areas would be most jeopardised by data loss.
• Australian and New Zealand organisations are managing the largest amount of data in the region, with 39% and 38% of companies in the respective regions managing more than 50TB of data.
• Comparatively, only 28% of organisations in Singapore and 27% of organisation in Malaysia are managing more than 50TB of data.

According to Rick Theiler, VP, sales, AsiaPac theatre, CommVault, organisations of all sizes and across all industries are missing out on business opportunities by ignoring the valuable data that they already have. Companies are losing money as they continue to overlook the significance of analysing unstructured datasets.

“Unstructured data comprises the constant stream of information generated from everyday interactions via email, social media and on mobile devices. It’s also about collecting data from monitoring equipment, scientific research, and from medical and government records,” said Theiler. “The most critical element is being able to identify what that data is and where it resides within an organisation. That process of data analysis and classification enables the business to make intelligent decisions about which data should be kept and what should be discarded.”

Missed opportunity to gain business value from increasing volumes of captured data
There is a large discrepancy between the amount of data growth across AsiaPac organisations and the level of analysis that is being applied, especially when considering analysis of semi-structured and unstructured data generated via text from communications systems.

The survey findings show that:

• Almost half of all Australian and New Zealand organisations (47% and 50%, respectively) are expecting data growth as much as 20-50% in 2014, compared to an average of 39% across all of AsiaPac that are expecting the same 20-50% data growth.
• Across all organisations in the AsiaPac region, of the 84% of transactional data currently being captured, only 73% of it will be effectively analysed.
• Large discrepancies are seen between the capture and analysis of data generated via text from communications systems (79% vs. 62%)
• Even bigger differences exist when looking at areas like video (46% vs. 29%) and social media feeds (27% vs. 15%).

According to Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, IDC senior program manager of big data and analytics, data management, and enterprise applications (white paper author), “The real opportunity exists in combining internal sources of data, like customer data, with external sources like social networking and location. This can help organizations gain a holistic view of their customer transactions and circumstances, enabling them to understand preferences, habits, and future requirements – all in context. ANZ organizations are among the most mature in the region, and they are now becoming more focused on utilizing their data to the fullest extent possible, but the lack of skill sets, optimal tools, and gaps in processes still present challenges.”

Data environments in AsiaPac are complex combinations
of physical and virtual locations
The survey also found that organisations in the APAC region are spreading critical business data across a combination of multiple locations, legacy physical systems and cloud-based services, adding to the complexity of ingesting, protecting and accessing information. The whitepaper suggests that in order to derive value from data across these increasingly disparate tiers and physical locations, it is critical that data be transitioned into a single, consistent, vendor-agnostic and universally accessible store.

The survey findings show that across AsiaPac:

• Almost 36% of company data is stored in on-premise databases, while 22% is stored on-premise across multiple sites and 35% in on-premise datacentres.
• Over 70% of organisations believe that a solution that can enable them to protect, manage and access all data using a single platform can allow them to 1) improve storage and network optimisation and cost savings, 2) increase protection from data loss and 3) enable more efficient and reliable DR.
• 38% of all respondents, led by executives in the financial services, telecommunications, retail and wholesale and energies & utilities industries, stated a preference for an end-to-end solution that allows protecting, managing and accessing all data from one single platform.

“Data management continues to be a top challenge for organizations in APAC, especially in the context of big data and cloud. All this demands new approaches to managing, finding, and analyzing data across different sources. Having a holistic view into all data assets across applications, devices, OSs and locations is critical,” said Jimenez.

AsiaPac firms that have approached CommVault to solve such challenges in the past six months include Australian Federal Department of Treasury, Stock Exchange of Thailand, CITIC, Consolidated Minerals and Comcare.

Theiler stated: “An effective data management solution needs to provide data protection, replication, snapshots and archiving of data from both physical and virtual environments. Regardless of where that data resides, whether it’s in the cloud or in the physical datacentre, this kind of single unified solution not only alleviates customer concerns around how to effectively manage and protect data, but it also provides key insights into unstructured data that facilitate smart business decisions.”

The IDC Driving Smart Data Management in the 3rd Platform Era – An Integrated Approach to Managing, Accessing and Protecting Critical Data, AsiaPac results survey and whitepaper were commissioned by CommVault Australia and conducted by IDC’s big data and analytics and NGEA in January 2014; they are based on responses provided by 505 IT decision-maker respondents across AsiaPac.