Businesses are accelerating their move to public, private, and hybrid cloud deployment. At the same time, digital information is growing rapidly, and companies increasingly rely on digital systems for all aspects of their operations. This is creating an environment where data protection must be a top priority for business leaders, according to Pure Storage.
Miguel Pleite, Systems Engineer Manager at Pure Storage Iberia, affirms that “companies today depend more than ever on their data and information. As a fundamental pillar of the business, data storage and protection must be part of companies’ strategic and risk mitigation plans. Taking the right steps to manage data can help organizations protect this valuable asset. Failure to do so could put the business at risk”.
Pure has identified the five key benefits of modern data protection:
1. Global cost savings
The financial impact of a ransomware attack reached $ 1.85 million in 20211. Affected companies suffer losses due to declining customers, declining productivity, direct repair costs, and damage to the business. Reputation if the data breach is made public. Companies affected by a data breach tend to suffer immediate drops in their share price, and, more worryingly, this price may continue to be affected in the long term.
By backing up data to the cloud and distributing it to more servers on and off-premises, organizations can mitigate the risk of ransomware attacks. By ensuring that proper security controls protect data, you can minimize the chances of a cyber breach. As a cost-savings benefit, this can also improve scalability for when organizations grow and need to store more data, as the ease of scalability itself helps save costs.
2. Operational resistance
Organizations with multiple servers, both on and off-premises, must be operationally resilient for storing their data in the cloud. This requires strong data protection on all servers.
Better data protection includes stopping data loss
Most IT consultants would advise organizations to keep centres relatively close to each other for performance reasons, but this is not always the case or not so easy. A disaster affecting one data centre could easily affect others nearby, so in some cases, it may be wise to choose geographically disparate data centres.
Also Read: What Is Mobile Device Security?
3. Greater ability to leverage data to obtain information and make decisions
Better data protection includes stopping data loss and data storage interruptions. If an organization’s data is constantly disrupted due to a lack of protection, this could lead to poor data analytics performance. The quality of knowledge derived from the data is directly related to the quality of the data itself. Therefore, their protection is essential to maintain a high quality of knowledge and decision-making.
4. Protection against ransomware attacks
During 2020, ransomware attacks increased 715% year-over-year. To avoid this, organizations need to implement a proactive posture against cyberattacks through staff training, threat detection, and proactive monitoring of the network and endpoints.
Creating isolation for the backup environment can help protect against ransomware attacks on the backup. These attacks continue to occur and can bring a business to a standstill. This can be addressed with the use of SafeMode ™ secure snapshots to protect the data backup. In the event of any ransomware attack, organizations will be able to recover data directly from these protected backups.
5. Compliance with data privacy laws
Organizations must comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) of the European Union. This law describes how organizations must collect, maintain, use and delete their customer data. Organizations could face penalties and fines if they fail to comply with regulations. Therefore, compliance will reduce the risk of a data breach and position the company as a leader in maintaining the privacy of its customers’ data.
In this sense, Miguel Pleite has declared: “The protection of data and the efficient storage of the same is a clear bet in a world that depends more and more on them every day. Organizations that take a modern and proactive approach to data governance will reap significant benefits that will put them at the forefront of the market and in the future. “