The following strategies do not work only on World Backup Day, but may save your organization if enshrined into corporate culture
Ransomware and other types of cyberattacks are the greatest risk organizations face right now. Downtime and outages from natural disasters and human error are still top concerns, but malware, aimed at mass disruption by compromising data across today’s complex, heterogeneous, multi-cloud IT environments is posing as a clear and present danger.
Against this backdrop, organizations are cognizant that data protection is more important than ever.
Here are the three key considerations when organizations are evaluating their data protection strategy:
1. Improve cyber resilience by uniting data protection with data security and data governance
Cyberattacks and ransomware affect the entirety of IT. Multiple teams typically manage the response using disparate tools in a patchwork manner, and these interaction points can become potential vulnerabilities. An integrated ecosystem of data security, data protection and data governance is the only way to achieve gap-free cyber resilience. Moreover, IT departments cannot afford to save their data indiscriminately. Implementing identification, categorization and retention policies will help in ensuring that the critical and sensitive data is retained appropriately.
2. Be aware that the Cloud is not inherently safer
In the cloud-native era, organizations often incorrectly assume they are buying an outcome, when they are really buying infrastructure. Far too many organizations and leaders fail to understand that there is a shared responsibility model between Cloud Service Providers and their customers around data protection. While the former are responsible for the resilience of the cloud environment, customers are responsible for their resilience in the cloud. The latter groups are responsible for protecting their data. The same rules that apply to all other data, also apply to cloud data: organizations must assess, categorize, protect and recover this critical asset.
3. Autonomous data management is key to secure and cost-effective backup and recovery
The proliferation of applications and data from edge to core to cloud is unprecedented. Thus, real-time manual protection is no longer possible. Reducing operational complexity through data management that responsibly harness AI and hyper-automation to continually self-provision and self-optimize should be organizations’ goal. This frees up IT staff to focus on more strategic and transformational activity.
