The trigger was rather simple: an employee plugged in a wrong cable, and that’s it. For two days, the company was stuck in a black hole. While most staff merrily enjoyed the welcome break from work, anxious souls in the IT division sweated in their airconditioned rooms, striving to up a system that had gone down abruptly.
This was not the case of just one office. Across Asia-Pacific, 95% companies experienced downtime or a data loss experience in the last one year. A CA Technologies’ survey singles out IT systems’ failure as the biggest cause (70%+) of data loss. External attacks on IT (over 40%) and human error were also found as key culprits, though not to the same extent (roughly 40%).
An earlier survey of CA Technologies revealed that downtime takes away a neat $350,000 on average from each company in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa) in avoidable costs.
A similar survey in North America & Europe showed businesses collectively lose more than 127 million ‘person hours’ annually, or or an average 545 ‘person hours’ per company, in employee productivity due to IT downtime. This loss is equivalent to 63,500 people being unable to work for an entire year.
Despite this, 56% organisations in North America and 30% in Europe do not have a formal disaster recovery policy in place. In Asia-Pacific, only 27% companies–of the 1,086 surveyed–boast of a comprehensive disaster recovery (DR) plan. CA Technologies, which revealed the survey results at its Asia-Pacific Media Symposium and World Expo in Singapore last week, says companies need to focus on DR planning to guard against data loss and consequent revenue loss.
CA Technologies sees cloud as an increasingly promising space to store data safely and cost-effectively. The Islandia, New York-headquartered IT major is working on a hybrid (semi-cloud) model for data management, especially for companies in the Asia-Pacific region. But the details of which are under wraps for now.
(Travel for this story was sponsored by CA Technologies)