Smaller companies are more vulnerable to cyber threats than big ones. While the latter have measures at hand to deal with the issue, the former remain ill-equipped
Digital has become intrinsic to business growth and data has become the core of everything an enterprise does. In light of this, businesses are now realising the growing importance of security. However, the question that still remains unanswered is: How prepared are we to combat data breaches? Digital transformation means businesses taking advantage of the opportunity to use data in new ways, leverage applications to do a better job — to undertake more tasks — and reach out to new markets and customer segments.
As data becomes larger and complex in the virtual environment, it becomes increasingly important to see how fast and efficient an organisation’s data protection infrastructure is. Data volumes are exploding; more data has been created in the past two years than in the entire history of human race. Applications need to evolve and businesses need to modernise as customers grow in sophistication and embrace digital technologies. However, new innovative capabilities also mean that workloads are getting more data-intensive.
Various enterprises are now realising the multiple ways in which Indian businesses can ensure data safety. There is a lot of sensitive information within an organisation and the best way to safeguard it is by limiting access to its data. Businesses are now focusing on proper authentication measures to access data. They are setting up good security solutions that are essential to prevent cyber attacks in the cloud environment.
In fact, most operating systems and softwares today have in-built encryption options. This will ensure an extra layer of security that the Indian business infrastructure will need to safeguard its information. The dynamics of data, especially for mid-sized organisations, are changing from devices to data centres to cloud operating environment. As data becomes larger and complex in the virtual environment, how fast and efficient is your data protection infrastructure? What new elements are being used to make it as efficient as possible? Increasingly, such mid-sized organisations are realising the need to have standard practices for not only protecting their assets, but also for the importance of data recovery. Hence, very soon, businesses will ensure protection of data from edge to core to cloud. This will help organisations have seamless control over their data and be prepared for any kind of data breach.
Many mid-sized organisations are drowning under volumes of data and are subsequently facing challenges of protecting it. While it is believed that large-sized organisations are mostly at the risk of being attacked, the reality is that small and medium-size businesses (SMB) are actually at a greater risk. These organisations face a problem of not having a comprehensive data protection solution that is sized and priced right for them.
Enterprise-class products come with higher cost and complexity, while lower cost products, that have traditionally targeted these organisations, lack performance, efficiency and application support. A recent ESG study found that 63 per cent of IT executives indicate that data protection is one of their organisation’s top three initiatives for IT transformation.
Transformed companies, as well as those looking to achieve IT transformation, require a modern data centre to thrive competitively in today’s digital economy. This requires confidence of restoring data, no matter what, through data protection that is simple yet powerful to meet the needs across workloads and deployment models while also staying within defined service level objectives. This research further adds validation to how offering simple data protection solutions that combine everything the customers require (protection storage hardware and robust software) to protect and leverage their business data is essential.
The key to manage data protection strategies across varied storage platforms is really about shifting the discussion from the one where data loss is entirely an IT concern, to one in which data loss is a critical business concern. These conversations about business continuity, known as the planning, preparation and implementation of more resilient business systems, can enable IT teams unify and consolidate backup and recovery, whether on disk, tape or in the cloud, regardless of the data loss threat.
Software companies are now designing softwares specifically to tackle the major requirements of mid-sized organisations —simplicity, performance, efficiency, and low-cost to protect. These features also make the product ideal for enterprise remote/branch office (ROBO) deployments. These software-complete backup, de-duplication, replication, and recovery — plus, cloud readiness with disaster recovery and long-term retention to the cloud — all in a convenient 2U appliance. While competitive products sacrifice coverage, performance and efficiency in the name of simplicity, this software delivers the perfect mix of simplicity and power — no sacrifices necessary.
At the end of the day, an organisation’s ability to quickly recover business-critical data will be paramount to its future success. Whether caused by natural disaster or human error or downtime — particularly for mid-sized businesses that may not have vast resources at their disposal — this can wreak havoc on your bottom line.
(The writer is Director and General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, India, Dell EMC)