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A recent survey conducted by Kroll Ontrack identified that 67 percent of organisations in Singapore and Australia frequently experience data loss from a virtual environment.

Singapore and Australia ranked second, compared to 73 percent recorded in Europe and 65 percent in the US. The survey was conducted with APAC IT professionals at vForum events in Singapore and Sydney in October and November 2011.

The survey, conducted by Kroll Ontrack, indicates that 52 percent of participants in Singapore experienced a data loss in the past year. The report also found that 22 percent of those surveyed experienced more than five virtual data loss incidents in the past year.

More than half (54 percent) of those experiencing data loss were not able to recover 100 percent of the data. Meanwhile, 74 percent of participants from Australia experienced a data loss in the past year.

Common causes of data loss from virtualised environments include file system corruption, deleted virtual machines, internal virtual disk corruption, RAID and other storage/server hardware failures and deleted or corrupt files contained within virtualised storage systems.

A virtualisation data loss can be catastrophic for an organisation.

Determining the financial impact of a business disruption is difficult because there are both tangible factors, including productivity loss, missed sales opportunities and staff’s hourly time, but also less tangible factors such as potential non-compliance penalties, damage to corporate image and weakened customer confidence.

A Forrester-DRJ survey noted that 15 percent of respondents knew the cost of their business’ downtime; it averaged nearly $145,000 per hour.

“Successful organisations realize that any disruption within the virtual infrastructure, regardless of how small, will have an amplified impact on the business as a whole,” says CK Lee, country manager, Kroll Ontrack Singapore.

“Virtualisation contracts often claim no liability for data corruption, deletion, destruction or loss. As a result, it is critical for IT leaders and business continuity planners to proactively include a data recovery service provider in their contingency plans.”

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