Resources

Around this time every year, I always see an influx of the top trends in technology. It seems like the perennial hot topic is security, with good reason as each year the number of incidents and evolving creativity with which these attacks are orchestrated contribute to an increase in the sheer magnitude of losses.

Every year there are new technologies that capture attention from network-based monitoring to artificial intelligence to increased threat detection for instance. Recently though, there’s been another trend that has cropped up, that has nothing to do with deploying a technology designed at mitigating cyber security issues, and that is risk insurance. Increasingly organizations are buying blanket policies that cover their liabilities, but do these actually protect your business? Sure, they might cover the expenses due to a failure to comply with regulatory requirements, or address lawsuit exposure but they don’t actually protect and, more importantly, recover your most critical asset: the data itself.

We have transitioned to a time where every organization is now a technology company. It is a time where the most significant source of differentiation is often the data an organization keeps. It is in this world where data protection is so critical to the continued success of a digital business. It is also an area where many organizations struggle to find their footing and are often left exposed to substantial risk of data loss and downtime.

Why is it so hard to get data protection right?

Complexity: Data is now spread across the globe and on numerous platforms. Multi-cloud is the norm. Data platforms have become specialized to address specific workloads further creating a balkanization of the data landscape. All this makes it difficult, albeit nearly impossible, to maintain a data protection solution that spans the entire data footprint.

Massive Data Growth: It isn’t uncommon for data to grow 50-80% year over year. As it keeps proliferating, that creates more and more challenges for backup and data retention. For organizations that value data, the need to retain more of it, and for longer become driving concerns.

Increased Magnitude of an Event: As data becomes more prolific in its use across the organization the associated cost of downtime or data loss becomes magnified, forcing requirements for increased expectations on the protection solution since data must be available and recoverable as fast as possible.

Further complicating things is that these challenges compound. They create tighter backup windows, more network bandwidth usage, require larger backup capacity, and cast a heavy burden on IT to maintain it all.

Data Management Increasingly Becoming Key

It is in this world that we must rethink data protection. Protecting data isn’t only about keeping it, now it requires continuous availability to be relevant. Data protection technologies can be used in new ways to accelerate migrations, power DevOps activities, simplify compliance and regulatory requirements, and facilitate the preservation of data for long-term monetization.

More Than an Insurance Policy

As I noted the idea of buying insurance to cover cyber incidents has become increasingly common and given the risks that are in this world, that course of action may be prudent. But it is time to take a critical look at the preparedness of the organization to address incidents more holistically. Data protection will be one of the most critical investment opportunities organizations have as they go digital. Organizations who make a corresponding investment won’t merely be safeguarding their data but also extending its value over time.

By Nick Brackney

Published with permission from https://blog.dellemc.com/en-us/