Singapore firms lost over US$1b from data loss, downtime in last 12 months: study

DATA loss and downtime cost businesses in Singapore more than US$1 billion in the last 12 months, a study by EMC Corporation found.

Across the Asia-Pacific region and Japan, the average cost for the same issues came up to US$34 billion. Global data loss is also on the rise, up 400 per cent since 2012, according to the study.

Singapore ranks fourth on the EMC Global Data Protection Index, which rates "protection readiness" for 24 countries. It is just behind China, Hong Kong and the Netherlands.

Even so, 66 per cent of firms surveyed in Singapore had experienced data loss or downtime in the last 12 months. The average business here reported having more than three working days of unexpected downtime over the same period.

Forty-three per cent of respondents here also did not have a disaster recovery plan for big data, mobile or hybrid cloud environments, and only 6 per cent had a plan for all three.

"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.

"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 thinking strategically about data protection, in order to better prepare themselves from unplanned and costly incidents that may result in downtime and data loss."

The research for the study, which included 3,300 respondents from 24 countries, was conducted by Vanson Bourne between August and September 2014.