EMC Global Data Protection Index: Key Results & Finding for the Philippines

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IT disruptions are a common and costly business experience. Even Cloud computing, big data and mobile devices are putting additional pressure on IT’s ability to protect data. Organizations need to develop a trusted data protection strategy that creates a bridge between today’s and tomorrow’s workloads.

EMC investigates the data protection strategies and capabilities of enterprises in 24 countries. The research surveyed 3,300 IT decision-makers from companies that employ over 250 employees.

Mr. Ronnie Latinazo, EMC Country Manager, revealed the results of their survey last December 4, 2014 at Society Lounge located at the Atrium in Makati during the EMC Data Protection Landscape Media Briefing. A Thanksgiving Party followed immediately afterwards to thank the members of the media for their year-long support.

The Global Data Protection Index: Key Results and Finding for the Philippines was shared to us that day. The survey says 62% of the respondents said that  at least one of the mega trends (big data, hybrid Cloud, mobility) is difficult to protect and one important thing we need to know is that there is a trend happening in the market. Companies are moving from a physical into a more agile world swamped with high digital growth largely due to these trends.

There is a lot of pressure and challenges on corporations to keep pace with the trends in terms of providing the right infrastructure especially in the area of data protection.

87% most businesses are behind the curve. They ranked the respondents based on a criteria, points were awarded based on the maturity of their data protection strategy, rated them 0 to 100, and they arrived at identifying companies which ones are leaders, which ones are early adapters, and so on and so forth. 72 % of the businesses are not even confident that they can restore data in an event of a problem.

The key areas that were looked at were measured on how fast they can recover, or Recovery Time Objetives (RTO ) or capabilities, how much downtime can they afford or avoid, confidence on their back-up infrastructure, types of technologies that they use for back-up system, and whether they are employing offsite replication capabilities.

Who is leading the way? 

Among 3,300 IT decision makers each categorized or designated as leaders, adapters, evaluators and laggards, The global results reveal that 2.4% of the respondents appear to be in the leader quadrant. Philippines is not any different. Out of the total population of the Philippines, 2.4% of the respondents also appear in the leader quadrant.  Adapters are at 11.3% (The Philippines has a lower adaption rate). If you look at the stats, that would imply our curve would appear more skewed to the laggards, although not very far from the rest.

There is no region that is really far behind when it comes to which is the more mature organizations come form. Among the 24 countries that took part of this survey, the Philippines is on the 13th of the maturity rank based on the stats. China and Hongkong are most likely to be ahead. Outside of Asia, the US and the Netherlands are most likely to be ahead of the curve, and UAE and Switzerland are least likely to be ahead of the curve.

58% of respondents consider data protection as totally critical to their organization's success, while 82% of the IT sector see data protection as totally critical compared to 33% of the retail sector. The IT sector also spends the most in data protection (10%) while retail spends the least (7.58%).

Why? It's based on the criticality and application of the business they have. The way to look at it, which industries actually run high mission critical applications, which are highly regulated, and which have business models of which data is the heart of their business model like the dot com, banks, telcos and so on. The retail sector is more on goods

Average companies spend 62 million dollars on IT and 5 million on data protection. So these figures indicate they are large corporations given the budget.

On the number of data protection vendors, study shows that those who have adopted a more holistic approach or strategy to data protection  were able to save money and were able to recover better. 41% have more than one data protection vendor, 62% from the It, telecoms, entertainment, and media sectors have more than one vendor, 53% or organizations with 3K to 5K employees have more than one vendor.

It continues to be a challenge as complexities are introduced to the infrastructure. Businesses with three or more vendors have a greater proportional spend of IT budget on data protection, which means its more expensive to have multiple strategies. In the Philippines, those with more than three vendors spend 9.9% than those with one vendor (8.96%) it just supports the hypothesis that a more holistic approach and strategy is more expensive.

In terms of disruption which I believe is more important than the spend is, 80% have suffered disruption in the last 12 months. The highest of which is 80% in retail. 41 hours in average were lost in the last 12 months due to unplanned downtime. Average annual lost for year is 4 TB of data. Retail sector lost the most. The estimated cost to the Philippines was 8 billion dollars total compared to 1.7 trillion for the whole world..

The frequency of continuous back-up, in varying degrees, companies have adapted different back-up strategies: some would back-up data continuously, some would do it less often. Those who do not back-up data continuously suffer downtime. The protection practice in most enterprise is not really that mature yet.

What are the primary cause of disruptions? leading is environmental cause followed by power loss, then data corruption, loss of back-up power, and then software failure, and so on. These disruptions leads to consequences like loss of employee productivity, loss of revenue, delay in product/service deployment affecting the SLA, and so on.

It is quite alarming to know that 66% of respondents are saying that they are not confident of their back-up system to be able to recover data/systems from today's platforms, only 13% from the retail sector is very confident but the IT sector is most confident at 56%.

56% still uses the backup system as their primary  protection strategy, and only 10% uses active-active (the most advance technology and strategy available in the market right now). Naturally, those with active-active as a key component suffered less data loss.

I relying on tape bad? Not necessarily but you would have to match it with the nature of the application that you are trying to protect. Not all applications are created equal. The nature and workload of the application will determine what level of protection you need to deploy.

The big question is who is in charge of the cloud? When you put your data in the cloud who is responsible to protect it? Is it you as the customer or the cloud provider? There were variations in the thinking. 57% says its the cloud provider, while 70% says they want to have control of it.

The other question that enterprises should ask themselves: Where is data stored? Do I put my application and data on premise, or off premise in a cloud? 43% of respondents had their data off premise, 14% had data on desktops and laptops, 12% says they had it on premise and its in virtualized servers, and so on.

Which one is the hardest to protect? In terms of application, the most difficult is the mobile device. We can expect a growing concern in this area since mobile devices are among the trends right now. How can enterprise continue to effectively protect data in mobile devices. Second is in terms of hybrid cloud applications. If you put your application through the cloud, how would you effectively protect it, and lastly in terms of big data, another one of the mega trends, which is as information grows exponentially and the volume increases, the more difficult it is to protect that data.

Future data protection cloud strategies include 46% currently using back-up as a service while 45% plan to use it in the future.This gives you an indication of the appetite of enterprises to leverage cloud services. 50% plan to use archive as a service while 46% plan to use data recovery as a service.

Finally, here are the key recommendations of EMC:

1. Make sure there are appropriate data recovery solutions in place for all your critical data no matter where it is or how it is generated. Match it with what the work load requirement is.
2. Manage an integrated data protection strategy and maintain a level of visibility and control for application owners. A more holistic is more cost-effective.
3. Evaluate the gaps in your protection strategy that may emerge from disparate vendor solutions. You need to make an assessment where you are today. Are you prepared to provide effective protection as companies move towards the third platform?
4. Match your data protection approach with the availability and protection requirements for your tiers of application/data.
5. Understand who "owns" or responsible in data protection - especially in the cloud.

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