COVID-19 had a significant impact on how IT teams approach data protection. During the global pandemic, many existing strategies were tested against new challenges and unanticipated threats and found to be lacking.
The most significant stressor on many organizations' approaches to data protection was the flood of data being generated by millions of users moving their professional, personal, and social lives from the physical world to the virtual world. All that extra data needed to be stored, processed, and secured, but few businesses were prepared to handle the volume.
Between the onslaught of data and the abrupt shift to remote work environments, IT teams quickly had their hands full.
Early in the pandemic, millions of businesses sent their employees home to work remotely. Although this was a responsible public health decision, from an IT infrastructure perspective, it was a nightmare.
Remote work creates additional network access points, most of which are insufficiently secure. Remote access expands the company’s attack surface and provides hackers with easy entry points to highly sensitive data and business-critical applications.
The pandemic also accelerated digital transformation for many organizations that rushed to adopt cloud-based infrastructure and applications to support a remote workplace and move operations to a virtual environment. One Microsoft study found that 72 percent of enterprises reported that their pace of transformation had sped up significantly, thanks to the pandemic.
The lure of large quantities of unsecured data coupled with widespread disruption within businesses prompted a surge in ransomware and other types of cyberattacks early in the pandemic, which even now shows no sign of letting up.
The elevated threat of cyberattacks has exacerbated many organizations’ data protection challenges, leading IT teams to seek out new and innovative end-to-end data security solutions.
End-to-end data security comprises a comprehensive set of tools—normally provided by a single, trusted partner—that protects your entire IT environment. The beauty of an end-to-end data security strategy is that it takes much of the guesswork out of data protection. But, as with any new process or technology implementation, due diligence is essential.
There are several key considerations when narrowing down your options for the best end-to-end data security solution for your organization:
Integrated data protection converges the data protection, cybersecurity, backup, and disaster recovery processes and technology into one unified solution. This type of data protection reduces complexity, increases visibility, and lets you manage your data protection and recovery from anywhere at any time.
Before committing to any new technology or process, ask your team the fundamental question: “Does it solve our problems?”
To get an accurate answer, take inventory of your infrastructure and assets to ensure the solution will support and protect legacy systems, multi-platform environments, public/private/hybrid cloud workloads, and other essential functions.
End-to-end data protection requires coordinating many moving parts. However, with the right solution, the outcome is a seamless security perimeter that grows and adapts to address changing needs and evolving threats.
When evaluating potential solutions, look for these core capabilities to maximize data protection:
Coming out the other side of a historic global health crisis, businesses are all too aware of the danger of underestimating and under-preparing for both known and unknown risks. Adopting an end-to-end data protection strategy is a step in the right direction toward creating a broader, non-geographically dependent security perimeter. Download The 2020 Data Attack Surface Report to learn more about protecting your business from ransomware attacks and securing your data against existing and emerging threats.