It is more important than ever for organizations to effectively manage, govern, and secure data to reduce the risk of data exposure and comply with regulatory requirements.
Data has become crucial to business operations in the current digital era. Offline and online storage options have grown more prevalent, making them more vulnerable to cyber threats like hacking, malware, and ransomware attacks.
Having reliable backups to protect sensitive data against such threats is critical. A robust backup procedure minimizes the risk of data loss by ensuring that data is safe and accessible even during a cyber-attack.
Due to the digital transformation, the risk of cybersecurity threats and data breaches has increased for businesses across all industries. Personal and sensitive data has become more susceptible to cyber-attacks as people and companies rely more on digital platforms.
Although organizations have taken several steps to address this problem, ongoing watchfulness and improvements in cybersecurity measures are essential to protect against online threats and data breaches. Hence, it is more important than ever for organizations to effectively manage, govern, and secure data to reduce the risk of data exposure and comply with regulatory requirements. However, many organizations still have difficulty putting them into practice successfully.
Mitigating a data disaster
Adopting a defence-in-depth strategy that uses numerous security countermeasures to manage security risks effectively is critical. This plan guarantees that if one mechanism malfunctions, another will be activated immediately to stop an attack and protect sensitive data.
Paul Martini, CEO of iboss, asserts that protecting data, including priceless resources, is one of a modern company’s most crucial duties to guarantee the safety of their operations, clients, and workers. He said, “As part of World Backup Day, I would advise all organizations to consider updating their legacy technologies and taking the proper precautions to guarantee data is properly backed up. Organizations need strong solutions that can match these adversaries’ sophistication to combat modern cyber threats. A single zero-trust network access solution should be considered as a replacement for legacy technologies like virtual private networks (VPNs), proxies, and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDIs). Long after World Backup Day, this will ensure they better secure and protect data.”
Given the importance of World Backup Day, companies need to improve their data strategies and put more effective digital practices into place. A thorough backup strategy ensures business continuity during a disaster and efficiently safeguards against data loss.
Also Read: World Backup Day 2023: Insights from Industry Veterans
Cloud-compatibility
A modern data protection approach with a well-deployed backup solution can protect the IT environment’s workload. A physical data center is no longer the nerve center of the IT infrastructure due to the growth of cloud migration and related services. The modern environment is highly virtualized, widely dispersed, and hosted primarily in the cloud. It may seem obvious to point out that most organizations have adopted a hybrid cloud over the past few years. Still, many businesses continue to rely on “legacy” backup solutions created to protect physical on-site servers and are incompatible with a hybrid environment. These antiquated backup mechanisms rarely produce positive results when protecting modern virtual or cloud-hosted workloads. So why haven’t more businesses shifted to solutions like Software as a Service (SaaS) or Licensing as a Service (LaaS) that cover workloads hosted in the cloud? It’s partly because it’s not everyone’s top priority; businesses typically have to start suffering before they start to move. The fact that many of these legacy solutions have vendor “lock-in” makes it more difficult for organizations to migrate their data to another solution, which is another crucial factor. For precisely this reason—because they never know when they’ll need to change something or rearrange something—organizations need to consider vendors without any lock-in.
Optimizing costs
Given the scalability and flexibility that cloud infrastructure can offer at any given time, it is essential for long-term success to keep costs optimized for cloud data security. Rising backup costs are due to various factors, such as the false belief that all data is significant enough to warrant a backup, using a single backup strategy for all data, and lacking visibility and granularity into backups, copies, and solutions. IT staff should set aside time to find and eliminate extra copies and backups. Then, by understanding the underlying data, backup strategies can be adjusted. As modern applications increasingly rely on vast data lakes and data warehouses, the exponential data growth can increase the surface area susceptible to breaches, ransomware, and accidental deletions. This is a road to skyrocketing expenses. Organizations should instead use a data discovery tool that enables them to explore component folders and objects and judiciously assign policies. To provide security for irreplaceable data, businesses must back up data in immutable, air-gapped cloud vaults.
Reliable recovery
Consistent reliability is another critical factor to take into account for enterprise backup. The primary justifications for purchasing backup are safeguarding business continuity and increasing resilience. The dependability of the jam and the reliability of workloads recovering data in a disaster are the two factors at play here. The backup must be 100% error-free because it is the foundation. Reliability will inevitably suffer if a company uses a legacy backup solution not created for a hybrid cloud strategy. The number of copies kept, having documents stored offsite, air-gapped, and using immutable backups is additional factors affecting a backup’s dependability, especially regarding ransomware. But recovery is equally essential and frequently underemphasized. As a result, this is where businesses often fail. The disconnect that frequently occurs makes data recovery less reliable than necessary. This is a result of the way infrastructure is built. Architecture designed for backup may be able to duplicate all of its data and workloads in 24 hours. Still, it may only be able to recover this data and restore it to the live environment in 5% of that time. Enterprises must begin designing their infrastructure with recovery in mind to minimize downtime during an outage or ransomware attack and maximize their backups’ effectiveness.
Also Read: Cisco to Acquire Cloud Security Firm Lightspin for Reported USD 200 Million
Complementing backups with proactive cybersecurity
It’s essential to remember that backup and recovery only work effectively and completely when part of a proactive cybersecurity strategy. Complete visibility of all data stacks is necessary due to the cost and risk of partial or full asset restoration being relatively high compared to many businesses’ budgets. In the case of larger organizations, the partial or complete restore can take many hours, days, or even weeks and significantly impact availability. If the ransomware entered the environment previously but wasn’t discovered, there is also a significant chance that several generations of backup versions may still be infected.
Therefore, the digitalized infrastructure of most businesses – which combines legacy systems with new technologies like cloud and IoT – necessitates more proactive thinking on the part of security teams. These teams must gain deep observability across their hybrid IT environment to eliminate cloud-to-core blind spots and ensure threat actors cannot enter the system undetected.
With a proactive approach, data backups can be used as a backup solution and last line of defense. Even though many businesses have significantly improved how they approach backup, many still have a long way to go. A backup must move from being an afterthought to being the foundation of the IT infrastructure. It is simply not possible to increase resilience to unintentional outages or cyberattacks without a contemporary backup strategy that is cloud-native and designed with recovery in mind. Having reliable backups to protect sensitive data against such threats is critical. A robust backup procedure minimizes the risk of data loss by ensuring that data is safe and accessible even during a cyber-attack.
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