Two things that everyone has learned during the ongoing recovery of the pandemic are 1) consumers, citizens and customers are completely dependent on organizations to be always available, and 2) data is truly a primary ‘digital asset’ of the company. Availability and access to critical data and applications has reached a new level of criticality as every sector of business and society accelerates the adoption of digital capabilities.

Asia appears poised to fully embrace the digital economy as the region expects a faster recovery. For China in particular, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) predicts that China will achieve 8% growth in 2021, compared to 3.2% for the United States. While Asia is expected to rebound as a region by 6.8% this year, according to the Asian Development Bank. High tech adoption rates and infrastructure deployments like 5G place many Asian markets among the global leaders in digital readiness.

Despite the growing digital know-how of consumers, the optimism surrounding a thriving digital economy is threatened by growing risks to ‘digital resilience’. The ability to continuously secure, protect, access and recover data is crucial to building digital resilience, which is the essential foundation of any digital economy. But this digital resilience needs to be built into all levels of business and society, which is why governments need to take the lead in spreading the resilience message.

Safety peak accelerated digital readers

Digital transactions and e-commerce are skyrocketing, and cloud adoption is at its peak, but against it is soaring cybersecurity threats. According to CheckPoint Research, cyberattacks in Asia-Pacific exploded 168% year-on-year in May, while in just one month there was a 53% increase from April to May.

Responding to these growing security risks is only the first step in ensuring better digital resilience. Digital resilience measures modern digital capacities for survival and growth. The big question today is: how are organizations actively building the resilience of their business processes, their existing and new digital infrastructure?

Governments have a responsibility to educate and, in some areas, regulate all sectors about the growing risks to data at the personal and professional levels. The message today must be to embrace a mindset where data protection, data access and data management must all be addressed holistically to achieve a higher state of digital resilience.

The challenge for businesses and SMEs today is that the costs and efforts of data protection increase as legacy systems continue to struggle to support modern services and innovation. Customers are not convinced that their data across all their platforms is fully protected and recoverable.

According to the Veeam Annual Data Protection Report 2021, inadequate backup or breach of SLAs exceeded global data protection challenges for 2021 by 40% (up from 31% in 2019). At the same time, 82% of all Asia-Pacific organizations recognized that they have an “availability gap” between the speed at which they can restore applications and the speed at which they need applications to restore them. be restored. As a follow-up, 77% of those same organizations said they have a “protection gap” between how often data is backed up and how much data they can afford to lose.

Research data from Veeam also shows that companies deploying modern data protection solutions see their data backup and restore costs 50% lower over five years and their data backup and restore teams 55% more efficient¹ .

Strong data, the foundation for growth and innovation

Technology and tools are only part of the solution to data protection, data availability and digital resilience. Improved data management increases availability through automated and instant recovery, preserving the health of data platforms without manual intervention and reducing compliance risks.

Managing data without a proper process reduces efficiency and can increase recovery time. Systems need automated processes to simplify management and recovery while reducing risk. Better data accessibility is the result of well-managed systems and defined data practice processes. Well-managed data provides near-perfect availability and uninterrupted accessibility, promoting trust and data integrity.

When data is easily accessible, innovation is accelerated. Legacy backup traps data, preventing its reuse, exploitation, and integration into real-time data streams for analysis. Modern data management can help free that data and achieve business goals faster. Backup can no longer be just for backup. The powerful central data repository can now be used for more. By reusing data trapped in backups, organizations can accelerate business analysis, decision making, development, and richer customer experiences.

Governments have given a big push to get businesses and SMEs to adopt more digital technologies. It is essential that they now support this with sound advice and lead by example for better data protection, data availability and digital resilience. This will require an ecosystem effort on the part of business, community and academia. But it starts with governments.

Without addressing these critical elements, we are putting all of today’s growth, recovery, innovation and digital transformation efforts at risk.

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