Singapore businesses have lost more than $1 billion (S$1.31 billion) in the past year from data loss and downtime, according to a global IT study.
The study by IT services firm EMC showed that 66 percent of businesses here have experienced data loss or downtime in the last 12 months. It surveyed 3,300 IT decision makers from businesses in 24 countries, including 125 from Singapore, between August and September this year, Channel NewsAsia reported Friday.
On average, each business in Singapore has experienced more than three working days of unexpected downtime over the same period, leading to loss of employee productivity and revenue for many businesses.
Yet 70 percent of Singapore businesses are not fully confident of their ability to recover after a disruption, according to the study.
Around 43 percent of businesses here still lack a disaster recovery plan to deal with the emerging trends of big data, hybrid cloud and mobile, which create new challenges for data protection, while only 6 percent of them have plans in place, the study showed.
“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. Still, Singapore ranked fourth in the EMC Global Data Protection Index after China, Hong Kong and The Netherlands. The index assessed businesses in terms of their data protection measures and awards points in areas such as shorter recovery times, modernity of data systems and confidence in infrastructure.
Globally, companies have lost 400 percent more data over the last two years, losing the equivalent of 2.33 terabytes of data per company.
Across the Asia Pacific and Japan region, the data loss and downtime cost have led to $34 billion in losses for businesses in the last 12 months.
“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 think strategically about data protection, in order to better prepare themselves from unplanned and costly incidents that may result in downtime and data loss,” Goh said.
