According to the Master plan on ASEAN connectivity, digital technologies in the region could potentially be worth up to US$625 billion by 2030 (8 percent of ASEAN’s GDP in that year), which may be derived from increased efficiency, new products and services.
In order to sustain this growth, ASEAN has acknowledged the importance of establishing regulatory frameworks for the delivery of new digital services (including data management and digital financial services).
Support for the sharing of best practices on open data; and equipping micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) with the capabilities to access these new technologies will also be put in place to help businesses along with their data management needs.
In Singapore, the Info-communications Media Development Authority (IMDA) has established scalable and secure data exchange platforms, aimed to formulate the appropriate data policies. They have also developed "data hubs" that will deliver innovative data services and applications. This initiative hopes to create a vibrant Data & Analytics ecosystem in Singapore and position Singapore strategically as an international Data & Analytics Hub.
Though efforts are being put in the right places and that the region is working toward a better infrastructure, companies are ultimately still responsible for their data management strategy to help themselves adapt.
With the total public cloud services spending in the mature Asia Pacific region expected to reach $12.4 billion by 2019, it is clear that enterprises are rapidly embracing the cloud and we will see more of them taking active steps to manage their data better.
Companies will also increasingly be on the lookout for tools that enable them to make sense of their data and to reap extra value from it as a competitive advantage.
“Given the plans from governments across the region, businesses should be able to meet their data management goals if they take the right steps,” says Sheena Chin, Country Manager for Singapore, Veritas, in an email interview with Networks Asia.
How data management strategies will evolve landscape of region
According to Chin, there are various factors that will contribute to the evolution of the landscape.
“However, if we look to the immediate future, one key change would be the way companies manage their data in view of the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR),” says Chin.
Chin notes that the new regulation will be put in place to protect personal data, where it can only be gathered legally under strict conditions, for a legitimate purpose. Businesses will also have to respect certain rights of the data owners which are guaranteed by EU law.
With this ruling set to be strictly enforced in 2018, countries within the region, such as Singapore, need to be prepared especially since Singapore is EU's largest commercial partner in ASEAN, accounting for slightly under one-third of EU-ASEAN trade in goods and services. This accounts for roughly two-thirds of investments between the two regions with over 10,000 EU companies in Singapore and use of the island state as a hub to serve the whole Pacific Rim.
“Knowing this, it is alarming that less than one-fifth (18 percent) of organizations locally meet the minimum GDPR requirements to date, compared to the global average of 31 percent, despite the fact that the regulations take effect in just over a year’s time, according to recent Veritas research findings. The good news is that supporting data shows that 44 percent of polled organizations in Singapore are in the midst of implementing a GDPR strategy, highlighting the keenness of local companies to meet regulatory compliance,” says Chin.
Shift in managing data
According to Chin, there is a significant shift in the way enterprises are managing data, from what used to be “retain everything forever” to having to justify why you are retaining a certain set of data. We see this happening in the regulations on the “right to be forgotten.”
“Thus, in this new digital era, it is really important for enterprises to know the location of all their data, and how many copies there are. There is personal user data in the enterprises’ primary business applications; the systems are doing automated backups of that data, and replicating it in different sites across the world. Visibility of location and the movement of data becomes a crucial consideration,” said Chin.
It is this issues which Veritas aims to help companies address. The company offers the 360 Enterprise Data Management solution, which helps organizations manage their data as a strategic asset. It combines capabilities such as information insight, availability and protection, to unlock greater business value such as visibility and control of data, application resiliency and optimization of resources.
“A data management strategy is crucial for enterprises today: for digital transformation to capture new growth, and to adapt to an increasingly challenging regulatory landscape,” says Chin,
Ensuring data is accessible to those with the right credentials
One of the key capabilities of Veritas 360 Enterprise Data Management is being able to maintain and manage confidentiality, duplication and authentication, for compliance purposes, according to Chin.
More powerful than setting access rights, one of our solutions, called Veritas Information Map, is able to give crucial visibility of an enterprise’s data across the world, for example, showing the copies of a particular file, their geographical location, or if they are not where they supposed to be (i.e. leaked).
“This is very powerful lifecycle management of customer’s data. Veritas only has the metadata, not the exact information within the files, and it is for the purpose of providing analytics to our customers. An example of Information Map at work would be in identifying filetypes, for example, finding .PST files sitting within file servers, which would raise a compliance challenge.
“Veritas launched Information Map late last year, and our customers have since used it to analyse over 40 petabytes of data, which is more than 50 billion files. It is anonymized, but we are able to see the trends in the information, which allows us to advise our customers,” said Chin.
Importance of the cloud in a data management strategy
Veritas believes that the cloud offers a balance between availability and cost efficiency of storage. It allows more active management and better compliance for customers, without the need for increased investment into on-premise storage.
“Depending on regulations, data storage periods on-prem could be a year or more. By utilizing a mixed approach, data could be retained on-prem for shorter periods of time, and leverage the cloud to store older data,” says Chin.
Chin noted that the company recently announced partnerships with the major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft and Google, making available Veritas’ industry leading information insight, availability and data protection technology across the hybrid cloud environment.
“With increasing data residency laws, the “right to be forgotten” and GDPR, enterprises will need to adopt an agile modern data management infrastructure to adapt to the increasingly challenging compliance landscape,” said Chin.
Successful case studies
Some of Veritas’ successes in APAC include Marubeni Corporation in Japan, where they needed to archive their Microsoft Exchange Online e-mails to comply with regulatory information retention and eDiscovery requirements. However, the native archiving, search and eDiscovery functions of Exchange Online did not meet their overall goals for email preservation. Marubeni Corporation needed to perform rapid, narrowly focused searches and find a cost-effective eDiscovery case management solution.
To help them meet their goals, Veritas Enterprise Vault.cloud was implemented to archive the incoming and outgoing e-mails of 4,500 of its users, reducing compliance burden and risk. The efficient eDiscovery solution also provided proof of support for Marubeni’s corporate ethos of the “persistent pursuit of fairness”.
Similarly, KT Corporation in Korea needed to deliver exceptional service levels from its new 11,000-seat customer service centre by ensuring that data would be available, backed up, and quickly recoverable. To assist them, Veritas NetBackup Appliances were deployed, due to their high performance and capabilities in deduplication and virtualized backup. The Veritas solution reduced the backup time for key servers by more than 50 percent. Service disruptions were also prevented because of fast recovery when hard disks failed, and significant hardware and operational costs were avoided because of deduplication flexibility.
In the ASEAN region, Veritas partners with several enterprises from diverse industries that span across banking, government, telecommunications, manufacturing – both discrete and process. For instance, Veritas has the opportunity to work with YTL PowerSeraya on its IT needs.
Veritas is regarded as one of YTL PowerSeraya's key technology partners. Driven by the growing demands of the business to achieve an efficient and optimised backup model for its highly virtualised environment, YTL PowerSeraya picked Veritas Enterprise NetBackup as its core backup solution, fully leveraging its proven capability to integrate and backup across heterogeneous platforms and diversified operating systems within the company since 2009.
Chin said that Veritas NetBackup solutions have successfully helped YTL PowerSeraya to post strong productivity gains from the reduction of backup time to manpower efficiencies and cost savings such as the maintenance effort required to protect its data availability.
“The positive returns on investment from Veritas’ solutions have empowered the team at YTL PowerSeraya to free up more resources to invest in various growth initiatives of their other business units,” said Chin.