Today we unveiled the findings of the new 2018 Veritas United Arab Emirates (UAE) Databerg Report, which underlines that dark data – whose value has not yet been identified – accounts for the majority of data (48%) that is stored and processed by organisations in the UAE. The findings highlight the vast and as-yet-untapped potential to leverage the prevalence of dark data, to drive transformational growth across the region, the report finds;
- 81% of Stored Data is Either Dark or Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT)
- Dark data accounts for 48% of data stored by UAE organisations, and redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data 33% - a substantial drop from 43% since 2016
- More control over data management has seen businesses more than double their clean data from 8% in 2016 to 19% in 2018
- Cloud is set to change the data management environment in UAE dramatically over the next 2 years
The survey highlights that while dark data accounts for 48% – compared to 52% globally – organisations in the UAE are taking more control of data. Clean data – which has been tagged or classified – has more than doubled from 8% in 2016 and now stands at 19%, which has led to a significant reduction in Redundant, Obsolete or Trivial (ROT) data decreasing from 43% to 33% in the past two years.
In other key findings, the report points out that the public-sector entities carry the most burden with 42% redundant data, followed by industry (36%), finance (33%) and utilities (30%).
While finance sector entities store 58% of their data as classified or tagged, public sector entities come second at 53%. On average, more than half the data (52%) that organisations store is classified or tagged. On average, just over one in three (36%) of all organisations removes redundant data regularly on a monthly basis. Nevertheless, efforts to clear obsolete data is gaining speed; 59% of public sector firms clear unnecessary data every month, while 50% of utility firms do so every quarter and the other 50% annually.
Other highlights from the study include:
Dependency on cloud storage is accelerating faster in the UAE than expected: While 38% - just over one-third - of organisational data is currently stored in the cloud, this is expected to increase to 55% within the next 12 months. This is a significant increase over 2016, when only one in five organisations had cloud storage and processing – and the rate of cloud adoption was expected to rise to 27% in 2017. Leading the way in cloud storage is the public sector, which has nearly 42% data in cloud currently with the usage set to increase to 62% within the year, followed by industry (to grow from 38% to 57%), utilities (48% to 58%) and finance (36% to 49%).
Top Three Concerns Around Cloud and Security: The top three concerns in using the cloud are security, increasing cost over time and lack of visibility while the benefits, as observed by Chief Information Officers, are that they provide a better technical vision within their own organization, and reduce recovery, back-up and overall IT costs. More than half of CIOs surveyed said cloud providers offer better service levels than their organisation.
Majority of Organisations in UAE have two clouds: The average number of clouds in use is 1.9 per organisation, with 69% of UAE organisations depending on Google followed by Microsoft at 59%. Nearly 71% of public sector firms and 82% of finance companies in the UAE rely on Google. Large organisations increasingly prefer to place all modern workloads on public cloud and yet 50% of organisations say managing cloud should be a shared responsibility.
Those with most sensitive, critical data are the most efficient in disaster recovery: Highlighting the importance that organisations place on disaster recovery, the survey finds that more than one-third (35%) of the UAE’s public-sector organisations check-test the disaster recovery ability of their IT services while the financial sector leads in focus on disaster recovery ability, with 64% conducting monthly checks.
