Data loss and unplanned downtime are costing enterprises in Thailand US$15 billion a year, according to a global IT study.
EMC Corporation yesterday announced the findings of its global data index, based on a survey of 3,300 IT decision-makers in 24 countries.
The survey took place during August and September.
"Thailand ranks 14th out of 24 countries in data protection maturity," said PK Gupta, senior director and chief architect for Asia-Pacific at EMC Corporation. "The Kingdom ranks seventh out of 10 Asia-Pacific countries."
Data protection maturity is defined by four stages: leaders, adopters, evaluators and laggards.
Thailand is deemed an evaluator, as the country needs to move from tape-based backup and archiving systems to disk-based systems.
China, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Singapore and the US are ahead of the curve when it comes to how they are protecting data.
Switzerland, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates stand at laggard level, as they still use tape backup and archiving systems, and recovery time is more than one day.
The study found that 62% of surveyed enterprises in Thailand experienced data loss or downtime in the last 12 months, costing them $15 billion, compared with the average of $34 billion in Asia-Pacific and $1.7 trillion globally.
Global data loss has soared by 400% since 2012.
Software and software failures, data corruption, security breaches and power losses are the top causes of data loss and downtime.
The study found that a mere 3% of surveyed enterprises in Thailand ranked as leaders in data protection maturity, with 8% showing adopter status and 89% at laggard level.
Mobility, cloud computing, big data and social media (including the Internet of Things) pose new challenges for data protection and disaster recovery systems.
Mr Gupta said enterprises in Thailand spent an average of $69 million on IT a year, but only $6 million of the amount goes to data protection.
The study found that average annual data loss per company amounted to 2.12 terabytes.
Mr Gupta said enterprises must adopt tiered backup storage and archive systems to support increased mission-critical service levels and applications.
Enterprises should rely on a single vendor for their data protection solutions whenever possible.
The EMC survey found that companies with three or more vendors lost 1.69 times the data as did those with a single vendor.