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New survey findings suggested that in 2012, 45% of the businesses in Hong Kong will use cloud computing as part of their data protection and disaster recovery plans.

According to CA Technologies who commissioned the independent research, titled "Insights: Data Protection and the Cloud," the results showed that as cloud adoption becomes more widespread, companies have begun to appreciate that cloud computing resources offer a solution for business continuity.

Commissioned by CA Technologies the online survey, titled "Insights: Data Protection and the Cloud," was conducted by independent research firmColeman Parkes in November 2011 on 100 companies amongst CIOs, IT directors and IT managers across small, medium and large companies.

Investments on data protection have continued to increase. Of the 1,086 companies across the Asia Pacific surveyed, (84%) had flat or increased budgets for data protection from 2010 to 2011, with 23% had increased investment. The research explored areas where these budgets will be directed over 2012, and the findings underscored the importance of cloud computing. 

Almost half of companies (47%) said they plan to focus spending on better protecting virtual environments, while 46% of them said they will focus investment on managing a hybrid cloud environment where private clouds are supplemented with access to resources in public clouds. More than one-third of companies (35%) will focus on better protection of their private cloud, and 30% plan to invest in improving work-at-home capabilities. 

"The research we've released today confirms that an increasing number of companies plan to use the cloud as part of their business continuity strategy," said James Forbes-May, vice president of Asia-Pacific, data management, CA Technologies.

"We're seeing lots of businesses use the cloud for protecting and managing hybrid environments and disaster recovery purposes, and the survey also affirmed that many are now looking to a more sophisticated hybrid cloud model too. This highlighted the need for a solution that allows them to evolve their data protection strategy at their own pace -- whether it be new on-premise technology, using cloud as backup medium or moving to a more complex hybrid cloud model," Forbes-May said. 

Despite the integration of cloud and the positive trend in data protection spending, the research said that companies are still vulnerable -- 100% of the surveyed companies admitted they experienced application and data loss incidents in 2010. The most common cause involved IT systems failures -- such as network, storage, hardware or software issues -- which affected almost three quarters (74%) of the surveyed organizations. 

This high level of data loss underscored the apparent lack of readiness by companies for these types of incidents. Only a third of companies (34%) said they have a full and comprehensive disaster recovery plan. Furthermore, slightly more than half (51%) of the surveyed companies ran full testing of their disaster recovery plans only once or even less than once a year, and more than a quarter (28%) failed to achieve their recovery time and recovery point objectives in these tests.

As for the barriers to improving their data protection and disaster recovery operations, 53% pointed to the employees' lack of understanding or procedures. Other challenges included inadequate training of IT personnel in risk and DR (disaster recovery) planning (33%) and lack of budget (32%).

"Today, businesses of all sizes understand the repercussions of not having essential data always available -- customers go unserved, SLAs are breached, suppliers cannot supply and staff morale and productivity degrades. However, the survey clearly highlighted that data protection strategies are still failing, leaving companies vulnerable and in dire need of smarter investments," explained Forbes-May.

"A previous CA Technologies study titled 'The avoidable cost of downtime' showed the cost of outages to a company over a year in the region was of US$350,000. Senior management needs to consider this cost, against the much smaller investment required to keep data and applications adequately protected on an ongoing basis," Forbes-May said.