Over the last few years, the amount of data your organisation has become responsible for will have grown explosively and you need a cost-effective means to protect and secure your data.
Data is the lifeblood of business, and in addition to being a fundamental part of running business operations, is becoming an ever more critical resource for enabling insight and driving competitive advantage. It is vital to ensure that all of your data is properly looked after and is held securely off-premises, safe from cyber and malicious attacks. It’s also essential that all your data is protected wherever it lives, on premises, private or community cloud or as part of services such as Microsoft 365, Salesforce, Google Workspace.
Good data protection and recovery makes good economic sense. It saves you time and money and shows your customers that you care about their data. That’s why we have prepared this list of the top seven reasons you should be reviewing your data protection and recovery right now:
1. Avoid Complacency
It’s tempting to get comfortable when you know you have a great data protection and recovery plan in place, but it’s essential for us to always challenge the status quo. To avoid complacency and ensure your data is protected, make sure you are looking at what is possible and not just focussing on what you already have in place. There is always room for improvement and no room for complacency! New vulnerabilities are emerging all the time, so it’s important to keep up with them. This is also where testing is important, make sure that you are testing your data protection and disaster recovery plans on a regular basis to assess how you will fare when disaster strikes and take appropriate action to get where you need to be.
2. Be prepared (it’s not if, it’s when)
When new ways of working open the floodgates for risk, you need to know your data is protected and that requires a reliable fall-back. Making data protection and recovery a priority is paramount to ensuring your business gets back up and running effectively when disaster strikes.
Secure, clean, isolated recovery environments have become more relevant with the advent and proliferation of cyber threats. As a result, we’ve seen that organisations are starting to invest more in operational resilience solutions, ensuring minimal business disruption in disaster recovery scenarios.
3. Know you can recover lost data
It seems obvious, but backup is the key to an effective data protection strategy. It protects your on-premises systems, applications and data, as well as your hybrid and public cloud ones.
It is essential that your data is backed up at a level which is proportionate to its importance to your business. Ask yourself, how much of that data could you afford to lose? How often do you need to back it up? Do you need to use a replication service for your critical data?
Make sure your back up and replication provider has proven experience in recovering your systems as well as offering air-gaped and immutable storage to combat cyber and malicious attacks, as well as an integrated archive tier to minimise costs for long term retentions.
4. Be compliant!
Are you aware that auditors and insurance companies want to see proof that you have a tried and tested plan for your data before they sign off on your audit or cover your data risks?
Make sure you meet current data protection obligations in terms of compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and any industry regulations that apply to your sector.
It’s also important to ensure that you are being accountable and have taken necessary steps to protect all elements of your environment, so that you can satisfy not just the auditors, but your internal stakeholders across the business from department heads to board execs, and external stakeholders such as investors and customers.
5. Minimise loss
Few businesses are prepared for the economic impact of a data breach, and how they will manage this when a breach occurs – are you? The latest published cost of a data breach globally in 2022, is 4.35 million U.S. dollars, an increase from 4.24 million U.S. dollars in the previous year* and the threat continues to rise.
When a breach occurs, it can bring an entire environment to a stop. The right data protection strategy keeps your data safe and secure from loss and other risks that lurk online.
Is your security strategy structured to help you effectively discover, prevent and respond to security threats? You need to build a layered security strategy that fits your business.
6. Ensure privacy
We all like to be transparent and approachable, but not to those with malicious intent! Your business is exactly that – yours and no-one else’s. When it comes to protecting your intellectual property, keeping ahead of the competition and more importantly, being that safe pair of hands for your customers’ data it is essential that you build a data detection, data protection and data recovery environment to mitigate potential risks.
7. Achieve peace of mind
Recovering from a data incident or breach is time consuming and costly. It typically takes weeks or months to recover, with months of ongoing disruption. If you have the correct frameworks and systems in place, you can rest easy knowing that when you suffer a breach you have a strategy in place to get your systems back up and running as quickly as possible.
Need some help to ensure your data is protected?
In today’s always-on, fast-paced world, hundreds of UK businesses trust us to keep them going when things go wrong. Like them, you can benefit from our data protection and recovery services to keep your staff and customers connected to systems and data in the event of a business interruption.
For more information on how we can ensure your data is protected click here.