Singapore firms lose $1.3 billion from data loss and unplanned downtime

Companies in Singapore are losing more than $1.3 billion a year due to data loss and the unplanned downtime that comes with a slow recovery.

While Singapore ranks fourth overall on EMC Corporation's latest global data index, which ranks the maturity of data protection approaches, business leaders locally are still not confident in their ability to prevent data loss or turn things around after a setback.

Just 20% of businesses in Singapore can be described as "ahead of the curve" - scoring well for having shorter recovery times, confidence in their infrastructure and having modern data protection systems.

The other 80% are described as "evaluators" and "laggards", which don't have capability to prevent or recover from a massive data disruption.

In fact, the numbers around data are worrying, considering the increasing importance of business trends such as big data, mobile and hybrid cloud -  52% of businesses in Singapore have suffered unplanned systems downtime, while 34% of firms have suffered data loss.

This is problematic, as 74% of organisations consider data protection to be critical to their success, yet 70% don't think they can recover fully after a disruption.

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When there is a disruption, it is usually from a hardware failure (75%), followed by software failure (49%) and loss of power (45%).

The top impact to the business from this is loss in employee productivity (61%), followed by a loss in revenue (42%) and a delay in product or service development (40%).

“As businesses continue to struggle to protect their current workloads, the findings from this global study show that many enterprises in Singapore are still ill-prepared to face the protection challenges that come with emerging data storage technologies," said Eric Goh, managing director of EMC Singapore.

"With data protection technologies evolving in parallel with the challenges that are emerging, businesses in Singapore will find it easier to protect themselves by staying abreast of these developments and thinking strategically about data protection, in order to better prepare themselves from unplanned and costly incidents that may result in downtime and data loss."

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