How to address the data protection challenges all businesses face
Businesses are capturing more data than ever before. All that data provides more opportunities to mine feedback and insights, and to better optimize processes and expand your company. But growing complexity jeopardizes this currency.
Not too long ago, you’d have data applications in only a handful of places. Today, data applications are running everywhere — on- and off-prem, in the cloud, and on legacy environments — causing data silos, impacting data security , and creating recovery concerns. Compounding these data challenges even further, problems with storage costs, data migration, data recovery, compliance regulations, new threat vectors , and more are creating new issues.
Whatever problems affect your data, you need to move data protection to the top of your list to address. A good data protection plan will ensure your data is safe from threats, minimize any downtime after a disaster, and help you make the most of your data.
Though each company must identify the unique solution to its data security, there are three data protection areas that every plan should consider.
1. Securing your data in the cloud
As cloud and hybrid solutions become even cheaper and more readily available, companies have continued adopting these storage options at an impressive rate. However, basic cloud offerings don’t always protect your data to the standard you need, or even protect it while you’re moving it between databases.
That’s why it’s important to build a cloud portion of your data protection plan. If you’re shopping for a data management solution, a few security-related questions to keep in mind are:
What areas of data management does the solution support? If you need data backup or a single view of on-premises and cloud data, is that provided? Properly managed data is critical to ensuring its protection and security.
What is the breadth and depth of the solution’s cloud support? What cloud providers does it work with, and can it operate on prem, too? If you’re considering any future data plans, keep those platforms or needs in mind while evaluating solutions, too.
Do the solution’s data migration capabilities provide ample protection? If you have to meet certain compliance requirements, ensure the solution meets those standards.
How does the data management solution support data use? Can you search across on-prem and cloud repositories? Some compliance requirements need you to be able to do this.
2. Preparing for inevitable disasters
Extreme weather events are the most likely of the most destructive global risks facing businesses today. With weather patterns becoming more extreme each year, companies are tempting fate if they don’t have a data plan for when disaster strikes. Extreme weather shouldn’t be the only worry; companies also face cyberattacks, accidental data deletion, and critical infrastructure breakdowns.
Your disaster plan shouldn’t focus only on recovering data, but also on how to access the data you need while systems are still recovering. A comprehensive disaster recovery strategy should:
Be flexible, with disaster recovery for multiple applications and virtual machines across hypervisors, and replication to and from the cloud.
Include global management and proactive monitoring of all your virtual environments.
