93% of Indian businesses see the value of data, yet struggle with data protection

Dell EMC announced the results of the third Global Data Protection Index revealing an increasing growth rate of data of 130% in Indian organizations (vis-a-vis Globally: 569%) and an impressive jump in data protection “adopters” of nearly 50 percentage points (48%) since 2016. The research, which surveyed 2,200 IT decision makers from both public and private organizations with 250+ employees across 18 countries and 11 industries, provides a comprehensive understanding of the state of data protection and the maturity of data protection strategies.

Specifically, the Index uncovered an increase in the average amount of data managed – from 2.79 petabytes (PB) in 2016 to 6.43PB in 2018 in India (vis-à-vis globally: 1.45 petabytes (PB) in 2016 to 9.70PB in 2018) – and a high awareness of the value of data. In fact, 93% of Indian respondents see the potential value of data (Globally 92%). While this acknowledgement is positive, most respondents are struggling to properly protect their data. The combination of these factors is driving many of the survey’s findings. 

Disruption Incidents Are Costly

The sheer volume of data and its importance to business operations make data protection much more challenging. Disruption incidents are occurring frequently, but more alarming is the increasing amount of irreversible data loss. More than three-quarters (76%) of respondents in India and globally experienced some type of disruption within a 12-month period. Moreover, around 30% of Indian businesses said (27% globally) that they were unable to recover data using their existing data protection solution.

Around 85% of India respondents are using at least two data protection vendors, in comparison to 75% worldwide. The most common type of disruption faced by organizations in India using two or more vendors was:

• Unplanned systems downtime (51%)
• Data loss (36%)
• The local disaster that affected access to data for an entire site/group (34%)

Although unplanned systems downtime is more prevalent, data loss is far more expensive. For example, in India, those who encountered downtime experienced 29 hours of downtime on average in the last 12 months, costing $958, 583 (vis-à-vis 20 hours of downtime for global leaders, costing about $526,845). Indian respondents said that they lost more data than global & APJ counterparts, averaging 3.31 terabytes lost with a price tag of $1,287,788 (vis-a-via 2.13 terabytes costing $995,613 globally). It’s clear that organizations now recognize both at India (95%) and global level (81%) to take data protection more seriously for categories of data that have the greatest monetary value.

Challenges Surrounding Data Protection

Although most of the Indian businesses are struggling to implement a solution that adequately fits their needs, data protection “adopters” sprang forward by nearly 50 percentage points from 2016 to 2018. Moreover, data protection “leaders” in India increased by 29 percentage points between 2016 to 2018, nearly 20 percentage points more than global counterparts.

The majority, 94% of India respondents said that they faced at least one challenge in relation to data protection (Globally: 95%). The top challenges in India include:

• The lack of data protection solutions for emerging technologies
• Inability to keep track and protect all data because of the growth of DevOps and cloud developments
• The complexity of configuring and operating data protection software/hardware

For those who are struggling to find adequate data protection solutions for newer technologies, 71% in India said they could not find suitable data protection solutions for artificial intelligence and machine learning data, followed by cloud-native applications (58%) and robotic process automation (46%).

However, the challenges presented by emerging technologies and the rapid growth of data are just beginning to take shape. As such, more than 1/3rd (32%) in Indian respondents believe that their current data protection solutions will be able to meet all future business challenges as compared to only 16% globally.

Cloud Is Changing the Data Protection Landscape

As per the Global Data Protection Index 2018, public cloud use in India has increased from 34% to 44% (Globally: Currently 40%, 28% in 2016) of the total IT environment in organizations between 2016-2018. Moreover, 100% of Indian organizations said that they are using the public cloud as part of their data protection infrastructure (Globally 98%).

The top use cases for data protection within public cloud in India are:

• Backup/snapshot services to protect workloads developed in public cloud using new application architectures (62%)
• Cloud-enabled versions of on-premises data protection software to protect public cloud workloads (59%)
• Backup/snapshot services to protect workloads developed in public cloud using legacy application architectures (52%)

Regulation Is an Impending Catalyst for Evolution

The research shows that 72% of Indian businesses felt very confident that their organization’s current data protection infrastructure and processes are compliant with regional regulations, in comparison with only 35% globally.