More than a third (34%) of organisations across Asia-Pacific have experienced an IT outage, disaster or major disruption, according to a report released by Ovum and Zerto.
The survey reveals that more than two thirds of Asia-Pacific organisations have implemented or are planning to implement a formal disaster recovery plan and almost half (45%) say that disaster recovery is the top data centre spending priority.
The report, ‘New catalysts setting the pace for disaster recovery initiatives’ analyses the findings of a survey that interviewed 400 enterprises from eight countries in the region: Australia, China, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, and Taiwan.
The biggest causes of disruption are natural disaster (55%) and IT hardware failure (55%), followed by power failure (45%) and network failure (43%).
Seventy-two percent of organisations experienced at least an hour of data loss after a disruption, with 33% experiencing a loss of one to five hours of data, making it the largest group of enterprises.
For those who missed their recovery expectations, 78% of organisations missed by less than 60 minutes for mission-critical applications. For non-mission-critical applications, that proportion was 64%
“The findings of this report show that no company is immune to a potential outage or disaster and in the event this does strike, the first few minutes are critical to recovering as quickly as possible,” said Andrew Martin, managing director, Asia-Pacific and Japan, Zerto.
“Organisations across the Asia-Pacific region need the ability to revert back to minutes before an outage, ensuring they have up to date resources and files. This is how disaster recovery plans really need to evolve to an IT resilience strategy to avoid not only down time but the risk of brand damage and potential customer loss. IT resilience ensures that from a customer or end-user perspective, there is no interruption to service.”
Expectations from customers have risen and additional regulatory requirements have been tightened, compelling enterprises to include disaster recovery as one of their top strategic data centre priorities. Disaster recovery software is now a top concern for many enterprises, with more than 45% of enterprises in Asia-Pacific mentioning it as a top data centre investment priority, ranking it third behind cloud architecture and infrastructure and security.
Seventy-nine percent of enterprises recognize customer expectation as the biggest driving force for increased spending on disaster recovery, making it the No. 1 factor in Asia-Pacific. Other major factors driving disaster recovery spend include digital initiatives (68%), increased mobile usage (67%), stricter regulatory requirements (67%) and increased cyber-attacks (66%).
Ovum believes that the disaster recovery market will move to a new growth phase and a new generation of software-defined and cloud-ready solutions. This move is seeing business and IT leaders making disaster recovery an essential element of infrastructure strategy discussions.
“In a digital, mobile and cloud first economy, disaster recovery is becoming a top data centre investment priority for enterprises across Asia-Pacific,” said Adrian Ho, principal analyst at Ovum Asia-Pacific. “Customer expectation is recognized as the biggest driving force; these are the customers who are also very unforgiving if enterprises are caught short on disaster recovery capabilities in an event of outage of any nature.”
Nineteen percent of enterprises in Asia-Pacific have already deployed a cloud solution when outsourcing their disaster recovery. A further 17% will implement Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) over the next 12 months, and 29% are considering DRaaS with no firm plans. This suggests that a majority of enterprises in Asia-Pacific will adopt DRaaS over the next 12 to 36 months.