Over a third of firms in Asia Pacific-Japan region seek better data protection: Dell

As organisations in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region witness a 64% increase in the amount of data they managed from a year ago, 77% of those surveyed said data protection solutions currently deployed were inadequate for the future, as per a study.

Firms in the APJ region managed 13.31 petabytes of data this year, a 693% jump from 2016, a tad lower than the global tally of 13.53 petabytes with a 831% growth rate for the same period, according to the Dell Global Data Protection Index 2020.

The study surveyed more than 1,000 information technology (IT) decision makers in 15 countries -- close to a fourth of them were from the APJ region.

Nearly 75% of the respondents from the APJ region said that they saw their data as valuable assets and planned to extract insights from them in the near future, the Round Rock, Texas-based technology giant said in the report.

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“In 2020 and beyond, organisations that leverage comprehensive data management and protection capabilities will be prepared to effectively mitigate emerging risks (and) optimise business outcomes,” Alex Lei, vice president of data protection solutions for the APJ region at Dell Technologies, said. 

The growing number of criminal activities, which lead to data loss and systems downtime, are the biggest threats, it said.

As many as 84% of those surveyed said that they had suffered a disruptive event in the past 12 months, while 70% feared that their organisation would experience a disruptive event in the future. 

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Organisations that used more than one data protection vendor were four times more vulnerable to a cyberattack, compared to a firm that used solutions from a single vendor, it said.  

The use of multiple data protection vendors is also more prevalent in the APJ region, with 83% using more than two vendors -- 3% more than the global average of 80%. 

“As we enter the next data decade, Indian organisations will increasingly look to deploy diverse cloud environments,” Ripu Bajwa, director and general manager for data protection solutions at Dell Technologies, said.