At a Time of Unprecedented Black Swan Events, a Good Data Protection Strategy Remains Priceless

Nikhil Korgaonkar Regional Director, Arcserve India & SAARC

The takeaway: businesses everywhere are under severe stress from rising costs. But even as companies rethink their operational expenditures to cope, they still need to invest in protecting, storing, and backing up their data.

Here are five ways your business can ensure data resilience despite the macroeconomic challenges steadily rising around you.

Here are five ways your business can ensure data resilience despite the macroeconomic challenges steadily rising around you.

1: Take a hybrid cloud approach to data protection
Many companies are adopting a hybrid cloud for managing their data. The benefits include greater IT flexibility, business efficiency, and competitive advantage. Backing up your data to the cloud can be a cost-effective alternative to purchasing in-house systems.

Maintaining and managing your infrastructure can be expensive and labor-intensive. One recent study reported that small and medium-sized firms find it 40% more cost-effective to use third-party cloud platforms than maintain an in-house system.

There are data-protection solutions on the market geared to hybrid computing environments. Look for solutions that combine security controls, ransomware detection, and data protection to ensure security across your hybrid environment. The cloud-adoption trend will likely continue even after spiraling costs are no longer an issue because cloud adoption will remain the key to accelerating IT modernization and business transformation.

2: Keep your guard up
Rising costs aren’t your only problem. War is raging in Ukraine, and the threat of all-out cyberattacks increases daily. Bad actors will look for opportunities to exploit a challenging situation and attack you when you’re most vulnerable. Indeed, when you’re struggling economically, your cybersecurity risk is higher than ever—because that’s when attackers perceive you as easy prey. Cyber crooks are like sharks. When they smell blood, they move in for the kill.

A proper backup and recovery plan lets you protect your data even if a cyberattack victimizes you. Your organization should look for an “immutable” data-storage solution that safeguards information continuously by taking snapshots every 90 seconds. Even if you fall victim to an attack, your data remains protected and can be easily recovered.

3: Embrace hybrid working
With the rising cost of fuel, many workers want to stay at home rather than spend their money commuting to the office. Most organizations successfully implemented remote and hybrid work programs during the pandemic. Continuing these policies can go a long way toward protecting the financial health of workers, keeping them happier and more productive.

However, when your workers are remote, your data is further fragmented, compounding your vulnerabilities. More support is needed to manage and protect data at remote locations effectively. The good news is that there are now simple, low-cost solutions that can effectively back up and protect data in your remote environments without deploying additional resources or capital.

4: Know which pieces of your data are most critical
All data is not equally valuable. If you’re on a mission to save money, it might not be necessary to store or back up every bit and byte of data in your organization. It would help if you looked for storage solutions that offer data-management capabilities like data tiering. Data tiering is a method by which less frequently used data moves to cheaper storage levels or “tiers,” helping you save money on data storage while avoiding damage to your most essential data.

Maintaining healthy processes around data hygiene can help you efficiently retain and back up all your critical data—and offload the data you don’t need. Another advantage to data tiering is improved energy savings—and cost savings—because you will need less compute power to store your business-critical data.

5: Don’t skimp on data backup and security
You need to ensure that your data-protection program is not impacted by any budget cuts you consider. It may look like an easy place to save money. But any reductions to your data defenses will come with costs down the road.

It’s critical to recognize the importance of your data and make sure that any cuts to your budget have minimal impact on your business operations. And once you’ve done that, you should look for cost-effective, next-generation solutions that enable you to safeguard your data and grow your business. The best solutions can quickly recover individual files and systems in minutes while ensuring that the data is always available.