Global Event

Asia-Pac firms are placing more emphasis on safeguarding their IT systems: HP survey. 

Companies around the world, especially in Asia-Pacific, are placing greater emphasis on safeguarding their business availability conditions, according to a worldwide survey commissioned by Hewlett-Packard (HP).  

Investment by firms in security, disaster-tolerant solutions, back-up and recovery efforts is on the climb this year.  

“A greater focus on such solutions, actually, has been instilled since the severe acute respiratory syndrome attack in the region a few years ago,” he said.  

Over 80% of information technology (IT) decision makers polled said BC&A would be stepped up in priority.  

In Asia, many of these decisions are spearheaded by Chinese and Indian high-growth economies.  

More than 564 IT decision makers responded to the survey, of which 210 were from Asia-Pacific. 

»It is a challenge to keep all the infrastructure up and running, given that there are cost pressures« JANE RUSHTON-YOUNG

Drivers for the stronger emphasis on BC&A were “lower operational and IT costs”, “pressures from the competition”, “maintaining uptime and decreasing downtime” and “preparing for pandemics”. They were ranked in various degrees of importance from one country to another.  

In China, for instance, competitive pressure, data protection and business change are deemed of highest importance. However, Australia tends to prioritise maintaining operational uptime, data and revenue protection.  

Data protection, lower costs and downtime from human error and intervention are the focus of many Indian companies, while South Korea rates protection from security breaches, denial of service attacks and data protection highly.  

All these show that BC&A solutions are no longer an option but an essential investment, according to HP Asia-Pacific and Japan’s regional business development manager for BC&A Jane Rushton-Young.  

Moreover, the Asia-Pacific region has caught up with Europe and North America in recognising this.  

“It is a challenge to keep all the infrastructure up and running, given that there are cost pressures and new regulations, even as companies’ clients are demanding improvements in service.  

“Therefore, while IT budgets for many companies are cut each year, it is important to ensure that there is compliance,” Rushton-Young said.  

The payback can be significant. Bonham said HP’s BC&A practice worked on the premise that the longer the time it took for companies to recover from downtime, the greater the financial impact upon their business would be.  

“Similarly, the less investment put into data protection, the greater the recovery cost will be,” he added.  

HP’s revenue from BC&A business has been on the rise, with the division’s worldwide turnover climbing by 9% to 10%. In Asia-Pacific, growth over the past year was between 14% and 15%, Bonham said.  

Many multinational firms tend to have their own disaster recovery systems when data are lost and often keep their own back-up data centres. However, smaller firms may park their data at recovery and back-up centres provided by companies such as HP. 

In Asia-Pacific, HP is seeing growing business in BC&A from small and medium-sized enterprises. Currently, it has 64 disaster recovery centres.  

Of these, three are located in Japan, two each in Singapore and Australia, and one in Malaysia. 

In a recent press briefing in Singapore, HP worldwide business development manager for business continuity and availability (BC&A) solutions, Lee Bonham, said.