While the pandemic has disrupted businesses in the APAC, leveraging data analytics can save Companies

In today's challenging times, it is important to gather data from reliable sources, analyze them quickly, draw insights, make informed decisions, and cut the frequency of human errors; to keep businesses in the regional zone running. With Asian countries like China and India facing the worst pandemic of the century and Australia, who was badly affected by forest fires, data analytics is the elixir for several industries. This technology will be pivotal in helping the business stay afloat or sink into bankruptcy or closure. According to, data and analytics company, GlobalData, the APAC Data and Analytics market is set to grow at a compound annual growth rate of (CAGR) of 25.5% during 2017-2022 to reach US$89.6 billion. The report 'GlobalData Market Opportunity Forecasts to 2022: Data and Analytics', mentions that Artificial Intelligence (AI) Platforms and Enterprise Internet of Things (IoT) platforms will be the major growth drivers and together account for nearly 54% of the overall market in 2022.

Data analytics is far beyond the misleading concept that it is affordable by big corporations with large budgets that can accommodate roving teams of analysts and data scientists. Today, every organization, irrespective of the size or industry, deserves a data analytics capability. Hence they are deploying Data and Analytics tools and platforms to manage disparate data sets with higher volumes and derive deeper insights from the data. All of this happened due to the convergence of technology with the mindset of surviving in a saturated yet competitive market. Swati Chaturvedi, senior market analyst at IDC, said, "Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) has seen an exponential growth of data and analytical complexity. This has pushed businesses with larger economies at scales like banking, telecommunication, retail, among others to invest in big data and analytics." As per the GlobalData report, countries like India, China, Indonesia, Australia and Malaysia will witness the highest CAGR amongst the APAC countries. Besides, in terms of the overall market size, China, Japan, India, Australia, and South Korea will together account for nearly 85% of the overall market in the region.

While data analytics tools empower businesses with increased agility, better integration with partners and suppliers while encouraging them to leverage advanced predictive and prescriptive forms of analytics. This reflects in having competitive advantage and differentiation in the market. However, many companies are still lagging behind or still rely on traditional pen and paper resources. Mark Webster, CTO of Profectus, says many of its clients still use excel spreadsheets to record data, leading to significant human error in what can amount to billions of lines of data. In a recent Coursera report titled, 'Global Skill Index', it was found out that while APAC is an emerging region for data science skills globally. Twelve out of sixteen countries in the APAC region are either lagging or emerging in data science which also includes India and the Philippines. And what's more shocking is that only four countries display competitive skills in data science viz., Hong Kong (75%), Singapore (73%), New Zealand (59%) and Australia (54%).

Marks fears that following COVID-19, some operations may fail to return to normal, so any gain in data efficiency now can only improve future operation. In regards to the economic impacts nations are suffering, businesses need to understand any financial leakage they might have and be able to identify it quickly and get on top of it straight away to minimize risk and protect revenue. For adopting data analytics is highly imperative, at least now more than ever.