3 steps that could save enterprises $1mn a year

There’s no doubting that today’s IT community is stretched. Most IT professionals are so busy dealing with everyday challenges and managing fires that there’s hardly ever time to recognize progress. However organizations are making progress protecting their data from traditional risks. According to the EMC Global Data Protection Index 2016 research released by EMC, organizations have reduced the frequency of the top four traditional causes of data loss. This marks real progress in the efforts to ensure data is available no matter what happens.

But it’s not all roses.

As organizations are getting better at protecting themselves against traditional threats to data but new threats mean that, despite progress, more businesses are losing data than before.

So let’s take look at what are the three biggest emerging challenges businesses need to come to grips with today to keep their data safe?

1) Protect against destructive hacking attacks

The study revealed that 46% of businesses in India surveyed have lost data due to external or internal security breach. When protecting against accidental data loss, the key is creating protection copies. But, when hackers deliberately try to take down a business, they can attack those protection copies too. EMC’s Data Domain and Data Protection Suite provide advanced hardening and data protection features for these rapidly changing threats. For even more protection, businesses can leverage advanced data protection solutions and separate copies of their data from the network. EMC’s Isolated Recovery Solutions isolate the data so that it can be restored even from the most extensive attack.

2) Protect data in the cloud

The study also revealed that less than 62% of all organizations are currently protecting cloud data against corruption and less than 50% are protecting it against deletion. Why? Because many businesses believe that their cloud provider protects their data for them. But, its just as important to plan your data protection strategy in cloud IT environments as it ever was for on-prem IT environments. If an employee accidentally deletes files or introduces a virus, that’s generally not covered by a cloud provider. SaaS backup, like EMC Spanning, enables businesses to take scheduled backups of their in-app data to ensure that they always have a fallback version of their files if one is required. 90% of businesses are also using the cloud as a target for their data protection. Tools like EMC Data Domain Cloud Tier provide the most efficient long-term cloud-based retention by securely and natively tiering deduplicated data to the cloud.

3) Protect data stored in flash environments

More than half (58%) Indian organizations surveyed admitted that they were not very confident that their current data protection solutions will be able to keep pace with the faster performance and new capabilities of flash storage. With 2016 being the “Year of All Flash”, where, for most primary storage, businesses are going to find that it’s more cost effective for them to choose an all-flash array over traditional disk-based storage, this can pose a problem for unprepared organizations. For businesses with particularly demanding workloads on flash arrays, EMC ProtectPoint copies data directly from primary to Data Domain with no traditional backup infrastructure, cutting backup times by 10x and restore times by 20x.

Overall, less than one fifth (18%) said they were confident that their data protection solutions will meet their future business challenges. Indian enterprises lost 4 TB of data in a year with average cost of data loss US$114,000. To meet the increased challenges it is imperative for organizations to consider data protection across all consumption models and continuum of technologies that protect against traditional and emerging threats. This will help them become more agile and confident while dealing with critical information - be it on the cloud or in their own data centre. Also, businesses need to build on the progress that they’ve already made with respect to traditional threats and partner with a vendor who can help them extend that progress to new challenges in order to ensure that they have data protection everywhere.

(The article is authored by Ripu Bajwa, Country Manager-Data Protection Solutions at EMC)

(Image: Thinkstock)