In its latest report, Commvault, a data protection and cyber resilience solutions provider, reveals that 71% of organizations in six Southeast Asian countries — Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, experienced at least one cyberattack in the past year.
The report, conducted by Tech Research Asia (TRA), saw that Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam were particularly affected, with attacks on both production and backup data environments while production data attacks were most prevalent in Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam.
Of those attacked, only 35% managed to recover 100% of their data. The top challenge identified was maintaining fixed data across multi-infrastructure environments. The research also found a significant discrepancy between business leaders and IT teams regarding recovery expectations. While 24% of business leaders consider a one-day outage acceptable, and 79% expect recovery within five days, IT teams reported an average recovery time of four to five weeks.
“Businesses in Asean are overwhelmed with huge volumes of data, escalating threats, and the complexity of their own IT systems,” said Michel Borst, area vice president of Commvault. He emphasized the critical gaps in cyber resiliency maturity and the ability to recover data swiftly.
Dark Data and Incident Response Plans
The report highlights that 91% of companies struggle with managing “dark data” — information collected but not used for other purposes like analytics. Only 7% of companies believe they have a proactive, mature cyber resiliency capability. While 85% of companies have a response plan, only 26% have a clearly understood and communicated plan, and 22% described their response capability as very unorganized.
“Testing incident response and cyber readiness has historically been very challenging, but it is critical,” said Daniel Tan, head of Solutions Engineering, Asia, at Commvault. “The trouble is that traditional modes of testing can be cost-prohibitive and bring significant disruption to the operations.”
The research shows that 92% of companies are using some form of data cleanrooms, with 28% citing improved data recovery post-breach as the primary benefit. Moving forward, businesses need to adopt proactive measures to ensure compromised data is recoverable, leveraging solutions like data cleanrooms to combat the evolving threat landscape.