Cost of downtime in India Inc.? $54 bn!

NEW DELHI, INDIA: According to some new findings shared by EMC Corporation from a new global data protection study global data loss has been up by 400 per cent since 2012 while, surprisingly, 70 per cent of India organizations are still not fully confident in their ability to recover after a disruption.

But there is a good news too that the number of data loss incidents is decreasing overall. However, the volume of data lost during an incident is growing exponentially.

In India it was spotted that 70 per cent of enterprises surveyed experienced data loss or downtime in the last 12 months. The average business experienced more than 2.5 working days (23 hours) of unexpected downtime in the last 12 months. Other commercial consequences of disruptions were loss of employee productivity (58 per cent), and loss of revenue (50 per cent).

Business trends, such as big data, mobile and hybrid cloud create new challenges for data protection in India, it was added. Some  43 per cent of businesses lack a disaster recovery plan for any of these environments and just nine per cent have a plan for all three. While 64 per cent rated big data, mobile and hybrid cloud as ‘difficult’ to protect; there is 39 per cent sense of all primary data located in some form of cloud storage, which could result in substantial loss.

The study brings to fore the 'protection paradox' wherein adopting advanced data protection technologies dramatically decreases the likelihood of disruption with many companies turn to multiple IT vendors to solve their data protection challenges; however, a siloed approach to deploying these can increase risks:

Across APJ, the findings showed that enterprises that had not deployed a continuous availability strategy were almost twice as likely to suffer data loss as those that had. In India, those using three or more vendors to supply data protection solutions lost 7.9 times as much data as those who unified their data protection strategy around a single vendor.

“This research highlights the enormous monetary impact of unplanned downtime and data loss to businesses everywhere. With 62 per cent of IT decision-makers interviewed feeling challenged to protect hybrid cloud, big data and mobile, it’s understandable that almost all of them lack the confidence that data protection will be able to meet future business challenges. We hope the global data protection index will prompt IT leaders to pause and reevaluate whether their current data protection solutions are in alignment with today’s business requirements as well as their long term goals.” noted Guy Churchward, President, EMC Core Technologies.

EMC Global Data Protection Index, conducted by Vanson Bourne, surveyed 3,300 IT decision makers from mid-size to enterprise-class businesses across 24 countries, including 125 respondents from India.