By Ripu Bajwa, Director & General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, India
We are nearing the end of another year which was truly a different experience for each of us. And it won’t be wrong to say that market dynamics have changed manifolds throughout the year. It continues to evolve even at a faster pace as organizations across segments are now totally dependent on digital transformation for the growth of their businesses. They have realized that the only constant factor for their brand development is “Technology Innovation”. Today, the swift transition in operating models powered by new age technologies has helped businesses manage the productivity of their employees, however, the high magnitude of work from home/ remote working culture has led to a surge in the flow of mission-critical data, which has given cyberattackers a pool filled with opportunities to disrupt the system. Interestingly, a recent study also found that security and data privacy is amongst the top barriers of digital transformation in India. The study highlights that 46.7% of the respondents in India believe that data privacy and cybersecurity are the major barriers of their digital transformation journey.
Opportunities for cyber attackers
The increased conversations around IT and digital transformation and adoption of new-age technologies like AI/ML, data generation has multiplied itself many-a-times, and the value/insight that data posses, the need for a sophisticated and secured data protection architect has become a necessity for organizations dwelling with zillions of data. Unfortunately, throughout 2020 we have seen cyberattacks growing and evolving, and impacting key segments like financial, operational wing, and reputational damage.
Today, even ransomware attacks threaten organizations of every size, industry, and geography. Notably, India witnessed 37% increase in cyberattacks in the first quarter (Q1) of 2020, as compared to the fourth quarter (Q4) of last year. All of this has forced many businesses to revamp their IT infrastructure and urged the need to deploy data protection solutions that not only help to safeguard mission-critical data but at the same time will allow CIOs to reduce complexities at a minimal operating cost. CIOs should be able to set up a robust infrastructure that shields the data easily from both internal and external threats and establish a continuous relationship between IT and security.
Finding the right solution
Hence, to overcome the hurdles of data security, organizations should look for the deployment of applications/solutions, that are not only cost-effective but even help customers protect and recover data from traditional and modern applications across core data centers, edge locations, and public clouds. The solutions should be able to provide faster backups and restore, allowing the data managers to quickly and easily recover the critical data. Since the nature of the cyber threat isn’t common these days, the data protection must support an organization from cyber threats ranging from ransomware to insider attacks. The analytics and machine learning capabilities of the solution should also enable organizations to monitor data integrity. Along with these, CIOs must keep in mind that the security solution deployed must be one which is an integration of data protection appliance, offering complete backup, recovery, replication, deduplication, cloud readiness with disaster recovery, and long-term retention to the public cloud.
The way to recovery
Times have changed and today home is the new office, and it’s going to stay for some time. Technology revolutions are evolving at a breakneck speed and organizations are driving for IT transformations currently, which were planned to happen over the years. The future is unfolding, and the organizations are revamping their IT strategy for better growth and development. Businesses need to first adopt a data-first mindset and then deploy modern data protection appliances that not only understand the value of data but at the same time secures them and make IT operations simplified at an affordable cost.
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