New Survey Suggests APAC Companies are Failing to Realise Efficient Business Value from Exponential Data Growth

April 9, 2014
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- Companies across Asia-Pacific region are struggling to realise the business value of rising unstructured data volumes
- Information is under increased scrutiny as consumer cloud solutions undermine corporate compliance
- CIOs are looking for end-to-end solutions enabling the protection, management and access of all data from one single platform

SYDNEY, April 9, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- CommVault (NASDAQ: CVLT) today released findings from a new IDC survey and whitepaper titled, "Driving Smart Data Management," which demonstrates that the increasing cost of collecting and analysing today's business data is placing corporations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region at risk for litigation through compliance breaches, and is negatively impacting their competitive potential in the wider market.

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Commissioned by CommVault, the IDC "Driving Smart Data Management" whitepaper was based on a survey of more than 500 IT executives across Asia-Pacific. Key findings include:

  • 72 percent of the respondents consider the exponential growth and complexity of data to be a top data management challenge.
  • 70 percent of executives said that their financial or operational business areas would be most jeopardised by data loss.
  • Australian and New Zealand organisations are managing the largest amount of data in the region, with 39 percent and 38 percent of companies in the respective regions managing more than 50 TB of data.
  • Comparatively, only 28 percent of organisations in Singapore and 27 percent of organisations in Malaysia are managing more than 50 TB of data.

According to Rick Theiler, vice president, sales, Asia Pacific theatre for CommVault, organisations of all sizes and across all industries are missing out on business opportunities by ignoring the valuable data that they already have. Companies are losing money as they continue to overlook the significance of analysing unstructured datasets.

"Unstructured data comprises the constant stream of information generated from everyday interactions via email, social media and on mobile devices. It's also about collecting data from monitoring equipment, scientific research, and from medical and government records," said Theiler. "The most critical element is being able to identify what that data is and where it resides within an organisation. That process of data analysis and classification enables the business to make intelligent decisions about which data should be kept and what should be discarded."

A missed opportunity to gain business value from increasing volumes of captured data

There is a large discrepancy between the amount of data growth across Asia-Pacific organisations and the level of analysis that is being applied, especially when considering analysis of semi-structured and unstructured data generated via text from communications systems.

The survey findings show that:

  • Almost half of all Australian and New Zealand organisations (47 percent and 50 percent, respectively) are expecting data growth as much as 20-50 percent in 2014, compared to an average of 39 percent across all of Asia Pacific that are expecting the same 20-50 percent data growth.
  • Across all organisations in the Asia-Pacific region, of the 84 percent of transactional data currently being captured, only 73 percent of it will be effectively analysed. 
  • Large discrepancies are seen between the capture and analysis of data generated via text from communications systems (79 percent vs. 62 percent)
  • Even bigger differences exist when looking at areas like video (46 percent vs. 29 percent) and social media feeds (27 percent vs. 15 percent).

According to Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, IDC Senior Program Manager of Big Data and Analytics, Data Management, and Enterprise Applications (white paper author), "The real opportunity exists in combining internal sources of data, like customer data, with external sources like social networking and location. This can help organizations gain a holistic view of their customer transactions and circumstances, enabling them to understand preferences, habits, and future requirements — all in context. ANZ organizations are among the most mature in the region, and they are now becoming more focused on utilizing their data to the fullest extent possible, but the lack of skill sets, optimal tools, and gaps in processes still present challenges."

Data environments in APAC are complex combinations of physical and virtual locations

The survey also found that organisations in the APAC region are spreading critical business data across a combination of multiple locations, legacy physical systems and cloud-based services, adding to the complexity of ingesting, protecting and accessing information. The whitepaper suggests that in order to derive value from data across these increasingly disparate tiers and physical locations, it is critical that data be transitioned into a single, consistent, vendor-agnostic and universally accessible store.  

The survey findings show that across Asia-Pacific:

  • Almost 36 percent of company data is stored in on-premise databases, while 22 percent is stored on-premise across multiple sites and 35 percent in on-premise datacentres.
  • Over 70 percent of organisations believe that a solution that can enable them to protect, manage and access all data using a single platform can allow them to 1) improve storage and network optimisation and cost savings, 2) increase protection from data loss and 3) enable more efficient and reliable disaster recovery.
  • 38 percent of all respondents, led by executives in the Financial Services, Telecommunications, Retail and Wholesale and Energies & Utilities industries, stated a preference for an end-to-end solution that allows protecting, managing and accessing all data from one single platform.

"Data management continues to be a top challenge for organizations in APAC, especially in the context of Big Data and cloud. All this demands new approaches to managing, finding, and analyzing data across different sources. Having a holistic view into all data assets across applications, devices, operating systems and locations is critical," said Jimenez.

Asia-Pacific firms that have approached CommVault to solve such challenges in the past six months include Australian Federal Department of Treasury, Stock Exchange of Thailand, CITIC, Consolidated Minerals and Comcare.

Theiler stated, "An effective data management solution needs to provide data protection, replication, snapshots and archiving of data from both physical and virtual environments. Regardless of where that data resides, whether it's in the cloud or in the physical datacentre, this kind of single unified solution not only alleviates customer concerns around how to effectively manage and protect data, but it also provides key insights into unstructured data that facilitate smart business decisions."

Source and Sample size

The IDC "Driving Smart Data Management in the 3rd Platform Era —An Integrated Approach to Managing, Accessing and Protecting Critical Data," Asia Pacific results survey and whitepaper were commissioned by CommVault Australia and conducted independently by IDC's Big Data & Analytics and NGEA in January 2014; they are based on responses provided by 505 IT decision-maker respondents across APAC.

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A singular vision – a belief in a better way to address current and future data management needs – guides CommVault in the development of Singular Information Management® solutions for high-performance data protection, universal availability and simplified management of data on complex storage networks. CommVault's exclusive single-platform architecture gives companies unprecedented control over data growth, costs and risk. CommVault's Simpana® software suite of products was designed to work together seamlessly from the ground up, sharing a single code and common function set, to deliver superlative Data Protection, Archive, Replication, Search and Resource Management capabilities. More companies every day join those who have discovered the unparalleled efficiency, performance, reliability, and control only CommVault can offer. Information about CommVault is available at www.commvault.com. CommVault's corporate headquarters is located in Oceanport, New Jersey in the United States.

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Media Contact: Justine Taylor, Howorth Communications, +61 422 663044, Justine@howorth.com.au; Ian Mackie, CommVault, +61 405 489182, imackie@commvault.com; Investor Relations Contact: Michael Picariello, CommVault, 732-728-5380, ir@commvault.com