Data is a perpetually growing and essential force for every business or organization and having a plan to manage all that data is critical.
More data means more informed business decisions and plans, but with great power comes great responsibility; now there’s a lot more you need to protect.
In this post, we’ll discuss the threats that affect your data and why it’s critical that enterprises like yours keep their data backed up and protected.
What Is Enterprise Data?
While it can also be a challenge for smaller businesses to protect and manage their data, enterprises have a much larger sprawl of data to keep tabs on. The amount of enterprise data is huge, and more and more data is being generated with every second.
Enterprise data can consist of large-scale information like sales information, payroll and business plans, but can extend to email exchanges, Teams messages and personal employee and customer information. Not only is the massive amount of enterprise data a lot to protect, but any interruption, disaster or other data loss scenario can mean serious consequences to your business.
What Is Enterprise Data Protection?
In short, enterprise data protection refers to ongoing backup, retention and access to your data. Enterprise data is everything you need to keep your business running — enterprise data protection is how you make sure that your data remains safe, immutable and accessible.
What Is Enterprise Data Privacy?
Enterprise data privacy is the process of keeping unauthorized eyes off business-critical information. This includes the level of transparency you’re able to provide to the governmental and corporate data protection regulations that affect your business.
What Is Enterprise Data Security?
Enterprise data security goes beyond data protection in the sense that it specifically focuses on protecting your data from cyberattacks, ransomware, internal data security and other threats.
Having effective enterprise data security means putting protection plans and infrastructure in place to help protect yourself and your business against the myriad of threats out there in the data landscape.
Importance of Enterprise Data Protection
Since any interruption, breach or loss of your data can mean serious consequences for your business, this topic is of utmost importance. Below we’ll discuss the ins and outs of enterprise data protection so you can formulate a plan that works best for your business.
Threats to Enterprise Data
Knowing that you need to secure your data is nothing new. What is new is the ever-increasing scale of data that you need to protect.
According to the recent Research Pathfinder Report from Research 451, “Enterprise Buyer’s Guide for Data Protection”, the amount of data management organizations need to do is already enormous, and it’s still growing. Going forward from 2022, the amount of data is expected to grow at a mean annual rate of 24%, and organizations manage an average of 6.5 copies of their data. These copies include production, backup and archive copies, among other things.
As the amount of data, storage locations and data formats expand, the scope of threats to your data is expanding as well. Threats can come from internal sources, like mismanaged access credentials and password breaches, or from external sources like ransomware, natural disasters and data leaks.
Unfortunately, as the amount of your data grows, the greater the impact will be when you experience data interruptions, loss or failure. Therefore, consistently expanding and evolving your enterprise data protection strategy is crucial.
Enterprise Data Protection Strategies
The Research Pathfinder Report from Research 451 discusses the exponential growth of today’s data and how, as a result, meeting disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity requirements is a major pain point for organizations that may already find it difficult to meet customer expectations for uptime and data recovery.
Good news is, there are several strategies you can employ to make meeting the expectations of your customers easier.
Data Backup and Recovery
A good place to start is with the 3-2-1-0 Rule. This means having three different copies of your data on two or more media types with one copy offsite and one that’s either air-gapped, offline or immutable, all with zero recovery errors.
Data Encryption
Encrypting your data makes it possible to securely transmit information within your organization. Even if an unauthorized user or malicious actor would manage to access your encrypted data, they will be unable to read the information inside.
Access Control and Authentication
Employing multi-factor identification (MFA) practices makes it much harder for malicious actors to gain access to passwords that could otherwise give them a point of entry into your business.
Data Loss Prevention
In the event of a data loss scenario, you need to make sure you have the relevant backup and recovery solutions already in place to help you restore your data quickly enough to meet your customers’ expectations and prevent reputation loss.
DR Planning
Facing disaster at some point is a fact of life in the world of data protection. Formulating a recovery plan takes the “disaster” out of performing DR.
Read this blog for more details about the 3-2-1-0 Rule and how it can help you arm yourself against data loss and ransomware.
Best Practices for Enterprise Data Protection
Sensitive data, particularly data that’s affected by government and industry regulations, has enormous value to your organization. Unfortunately, your most sensitive data holds tremendous value to hackers as well.
Good news is, there are several best practices you can employ to make sure your most important assets stay in your hands.
Regularly back up your data. Frequent backups mean that if you experience an outage, you won’t lose a large amount of data when restoring to your most-recent backup.
Employ strong passwords and authentication measures. While it can be tedious to frequently change the password to all your work devices and programs, having employees make strong passwords that are changed frequently and employing MFA can go a long way to preventing a disaster scenario from happening in the first place.
Audit data access. Make sure that everyone who has access to your organization’s sensitive information still requires those credentials. Reassess who really needs to access that data, and who doesn’t.
Train your employees and spread awareness. Training your employees on how to avoid all the risk factors can reduce the number of attacks that are generated through simple human error. Educate them about the different kinds of risks that exist, and the consequences that come with them.
Perform regular security updates and patches. Falling behind on updates and patches makes you much more vulnerable to malicious actors. An organization with outdated tech is easy prey for hackers — don’t make yourself a target.
Enterprise Data Security Challenges
Even though effective enterprise data management is achievable, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. The data landscape is constantly changing, and your organization must be extremely diligent if you want to keep up.
Cost. Data security is not always cheap, and managing many different solutions with compatibility issues, outdated software and lock-ins just racks up the price. Even worse, if your solution proves to be ineffective, the cost of a data loss scenario can be devastating.
According to the Research Pathfinder Report released by Research 451, of the amount of respondents who experienced significant outages over the past two years, 66% of those incidents cost their organizations over $100,000 USD in damages each.
Complexity. Since the scope and size of your data protection environment has increased exponentially, the components you need to include in your data security strategy have multiplied as well. An effective data security strategy has a ton of moving parts, so it’s imperative that you come up with a plan and find a data protection solution that makes the process as streamlined as possible.
Integration with existing systems. As new needs arise in the world of data protection, you may need to tack on additional solutions to your existing systems. This can be challenging if you find yourself having to manage several solutions from different vendors at once.
Balancing accessibility with security. We’ve established the importance of data security, but you don’t want to build your walls too high. It’s essential to strike a balance between having an airtight data protection strategy and an environment that is easy to work within on a day-to-day basis.
Veeam Enterprise Protection Solutions
Solutions like Veeam Data Platform are built to keep your business running.
Veeam Data Platform is built on top of Veeam’s industry-leading data backup and recovery software, Veeam Backup & Replication, which is fast, reliable and easy-to-use for a variety of systems and applications. This includes features like Instant Recovery, backup copy, replication and more. The Premium version of Veeam Data Platform includes several other features and services like data archiving, analytics and observability that can help you better manage your backup and data compliance.
Veeam Data Platform focuses on three key requirements to keeping your business running: Data Security, Data Recovery and Data Freedom. Find out more.
Related resources:
Data Protection Trends Report 2023