By Ripu Bajwa, Director & General Manager – Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies
Until not so long ago, the business environment was less dynamic and complex. In today’s world, the race towards the digital economy is pushing organizations to constantly reinvent their business strategies and priorities. With more and more organizations embracing digital transformation, there has been an exponential growth of data. According to the recent study conducted by Vanson Bourne, organisations in Asia Pacific and Japan on an average are managing 13.31 petabytes of data, a staggering 693% increase since 2016. In order to stay relevant, businesses of all sizes are required to look at new ways to accelerate their IT transformation to fully unlock the value of their data capital and make data driven decisions for better business outcomes.
While this unprecedented growth of data creates enormous opportunities for businesses, it also poses fresh and often, unforeseen risks. Despite the increased investments to safeguard data, organizations have witnessed a steady uptick in application downtime and data loss. According to the same study, about 84% organizations in APJ have reported suffering from a disruptive event in the last 12 months, which eventually resulted in an increased average annual cost of data loss. In fact, the average annual costs of data loss in this 12-month period for APJ organizations exceeded $1.3M USD, which was significantly higher than other regions as well as the global average of $1.01M USD. Moreover, the cost of downtime for APJ businesses have also grown manifolds since 2018.
Striking a comparison with the Indian context, the data protection ecosystem in the country is quite similar. India is at a cusp of becoming a digital economy that has resulted in data deluge. Although, the Indian organizations are now seeing better potential in the value of data & are monetizing it more than ever, they are also vulnerable to external threats. According to an industry research by Frost & Sullivan, 46% of Indian organizations that are in the process of digital transformation have encountered a security incident. In fact, Indian businesses are almost at par with their global and APJ counterparts when it comes to being confident about their current data protection solutions being able to meet the future business challenges.
At this juncture, two major challenges surrounding the organizations across APJ and India are combating data protection complexity and deploying robust data management solutions. By considering these three key data management strategies, businesses will be able to fuel innovation, provide deep insight into the needs of their customers, partners and stakeholders as well as generate greater revenue streams:
1. Partner with a single data protection provider
When identifying the most effective data protection strategy, organizations should keep in mind that multiple vendor solutions often lead to increased IT complexity. The use of disparate management tools combined with the need to rely on multiple vendors for service and support, can make day-to-day data protection management very challenging. These becomes extremely crucial especially during a downtime event. Interestingly, 83% of the APJ businesses reported that they were using solutions from multiple data protection vendors.
Hence, investing in a single data protection partner with an extensive portfolio of solutions to protect data in all its forms (on-premise, in remote locations and in the cloud) is a surefire way to reduce complexity and mitigate the risk of downtime during an outage.
2. Treat the data as capital:
As the volume, variety and velocity of data grows at a rapid pace and workloads span from the distributed core, to the edge and to the cloud, organisations must develop robust data management strategies to combat increased security threats and cyber- attacks.
Once the organization fully appreciates how data can be leveraged to drive business value, enhance customer satisfaction and gain a competitive advantage, they will be more likely to support investments to bolster their data protection capabilities.
3. Prioritize ease of management across locations:
As IT leaders look to derive value from their data to gain competitive edge, they should also ensure that their data is well protected and recoverable, no matter where it resides. Hence, it is essential for IT leaders to deploy comprehensive data protection solutions that are easy to manage, easy to scale which deliver the resiliency and protection across multiple environments including on-premise, in edge locations as well as across hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructure.
The most forward-thinking organizations are learning the enormous value of data protection and management firsthand. Therefore, as organizations at both APJ and India level, prepare themselves for the next data decade, developing an airtight and scalable data protection strategy will be the key to their business revenue and competitive positioning forward.
