The new Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) in Thailand will stimulate spending on data protection technologies in 2019, says Dell EMC.
Data loss has proved far more expensive for Asia-Pacific and Japanese organisations, according to the IT firm. On average, 20 hours of downtime in the last 12 months cost businesses US$494,869, while companies that lost data lost 2.04 terabytes on average with a price tag of $939,703.
Anothai Wettayakorn, vice-president for Asia emerging markets and South Asia consumer business at Dell EMC, expects investment in data protection technology among Thai organisations to grow at double-digit rates this year, similar to levels of the past two years.
He said the PDPA, which was passed by the National Legislative Assembly, will become effective once it receives royal endorsement.
The law has a one-year grace period to allow businesses to prepare their IT systems to comply with the new rules. A committee supervising the law will work to outline details such as penalties for those who leak personal data.
Mr Anothai said businesses and state agencies involved with personal data need to ensure that their data protection systems comply with the law before it's fully enforced.
Installing data protection requires at least three months, with investment costs starting from 500,000 baht. Dell EMC has a data protection technology solution that costs 1 million baht, and it plans to offer more affordable products for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).
According to Mr Anothai, awareness of cybersecurity and data protection in Thailand has been rising since last year, due to the EU's General Data Protection Regulation and its effects on Thai businesses.
"Cybersecurity and data protection are among the top three priority investments for Thai companies over the past two years, compared with top 10 previously," he said.
Moreover, the rise of hybrid cloud and multi-cloud adoption and the data explosion in digitisation, as well as increasing cyber threats, have driven demand for data protection technologies.
Dell EMC disclosed its study of the Global Data Protection Index it carried out in 2018, covering 2,200 IT decision-makers in 11 industries from 18 countries (not including Thailand).
Organisations in Asia-Pacific and Japan managed 8.13 petabytes of data in 2018, versus 1.68PB in 2016, according to Saravanan Krishnan, data protection solutions director for South Asia at Dell EMC.
Some 90% of businesses see the potential value of data, but only 35% are monetising it. While 94% face data protection challenges, 43% struggle to find suitable data protection solutions for newer technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Some 34% of respondents are very confident that their data protection infrastructure is compliant with regional regulations, but only 18% believe that their data protection solutions will meet all future challenges.
Mr Anothai said about 10% of Thai companies are in the leader group of data protection, mostly in banking, telecom and manufacturing, spending 20-40 million baht on data protection. They claim to recover data within two hours. The adoption group can recover data within 2-6 hours, while evaluators (mostly SMEs) can recover within 6-9 hours and laggards take 12 hours.