How safe is your data in the cloud and elsewhere?

In today’s increasingly digital world, data has become the lifeblood of the enterprise. It’s critical to the future of any organisation and its volume continues to grow, with IDC predicting that the world will be creating 175 zettabytes of data a year by 2025. As it’s Data Privacy Day, there’s no better time to take a look into how enterprises are currently protecting their data.

Cloud - both a blessing and a curse

For many years there was a drought of innovation when it came to how data was protected, particularly when it came to the backup and recovery space. Then, along came cloud which, in many respects, demanded innovation. With cloud came a whole new world of opportunities.

Whereas legacy systems were similar to a vault, with everything of value secured and locked away inside, with the cloud everything in the vault has a productive purpose and is copied somewhere else, making it instantly accessible and recoverable should something like ransomware break the lock.

The private data is also useful, especially in conjunction with machine learning: whether it’s making future business decisions or simply identifying gaps, data analytics can help inform every level of your organisation.

However, with data no longer confined to on premises storage it now meant that enterprises had a multitude of infrastructure environments which needed protecting. This in turn opened up a profusion of new challenges.

For enterprises to safeguard their data in these new complex multi cloud environments, it’s essential that they have a solution that delivers enterprise-grade backup and recovery to this new genre of massive cloud-based applications via fast performance, scalability across hundreds of nodes and multiple clouds, and consumer-like simplicity.

Staying a step ahead of cyber criminals

With data growing at a phenomenal rate in enterprises around the world, it is under attack more than ever. At any given moment access to data can be compromised through things like system failure, power outages or - even worse - cybercrime such as ransomware.

Nowadays, the threat of a cyber attack is hard to avoid. Its growth can be attributed to the ever-increasing volume of valuable data being stored digitally. Businesses in every sector are being affected in what is quickly becoming an epidemic. Some of the largest data breaches last year involved huge corporate companies such as British Airways, Carphone Warehouse, Ticketmaster and Superdrug which only proves that cyber criminals don’t discriminate - everyone is a potential target and in this day and age, it’s a matter of ‘when’ rather than ‘if.’

Given the current cyber crime landscape, it’s no longer enough to try to prevent attacks - enterprises need to be one step ahead with validated systems that can be quickly and easily restored so you can avoid paying the ransom and have the ability to return to ‘business as usual’ in record time.

Data Privacy is not an insurance policy

Everything is now digital and as a result there is all this data which can be used in more and more different ways to create value. In response there needs to be a higher level of protection across the board.

Data privacy is no longer an insurance policy. In today’s data rich and cyber attack prevalent world, data protection has become business critical especially with GDPR now in full swing.

Whether your company is big or small, investing wisely in the right level of protection for your data will enable your business to run after the unexpected happens. It may even be the difference between ransomware being a costly, time-consuming disaster for your business or a minor inconvenience.