By Alexander Villafania
MAKATI CITY, METRO MANILA—At least 86 percent of companies in the Philippines are not confident that they can recover from a disaster because of data loss, according to a survey by research firm Vanson Bourne.
The survey covered 2,500 executives and decision makers across Asia Pacific and Japan. Of this figure 250 came from the Philippines. The study was commissioned by digital storage company EMC.
At least 74 percent of companies surveyed in the Philippines have suffered from lost data or infrastructure downtime in 2011.
Causes of downtime include hardware failure (66 percent), loss of power (45 percent), software failure (40 percent), and data corruption (31 percent).
User error (27 percent), and natural disasters (23 percent) are also among the reasons for downtime.
Surprisingly, the Philippines suffers a lot more on data loss due to security breaches: 46 percent in the Philippines compared to 32 percent for the rest of the companies surveyed across Asia Pacific.
This explains why those surveyed in the Philippines would spend more on digital security (45 percent) rather than on increasing their IT systems backup and disaster recovery (23 percent for the Philippines compared to 54 percent for other countries).
According to the survey, Philippine companies are more reactionary than proactive when it comes to investing in data systems backup and recovery, as well as security.
Based on the numbers, companies in the Philippines are not yet as prepared when it comes to failure tolerance of their IT backup systems as their counterparts in other countries, said Shane Moore, EMC Asia Pacific and Japan Director for Backup and Recovery Systems.
There are still areas where change is both IT investment outlook and management are not fully understood and accepted yet.
“There’s a need to for transformation in certain aspects of business. Companies in the Philippines have yet to embrace some of the new methods of IT management and backup methodology,” Moore said.
Data prevention, protection, and backup is an area where companies in the Philippines have to fully implement.
The study showed that Philippine companies also attribute loss of employee productivity, loss customer confidence, and loss of revenue to system downtime.
This is worsened as data stored has either been corrupted and need to be restored remotely, which takes time.
“Unless there is a major change in perception, you won’t see any change on the reasons for loss in productivity among these companies,” Moore said.
***
Filquest Media Concepts, Inc. (http://filquestmedia.com) is a multimedia publisher and provider of web, print, mobile and video content. We do this for our own media properties, but we also extend that service as an outsourced provider for news organizations, web, print, mobile and broadcasting companies.
