Businesses are shifting to public, private, and hybrid cloud deployments. At the same time, digital information is growing rapidly and enterprises are relying on digital systems for all aspects of their operations. Thus, this makes data protection a top priority for business leaders, according to Pure Storage.

Sunil Chavan, VP, emerging technology solutions, Asia Pacific and Japan, Pure Storage, says: “Enterprises rely on their data and information more than ever. As a mission-critical pillar of business, data storage and protection must form part of the business’s strategic and risk-mitigation plans. Putting the right measures in place to manage data can help organisations protect this invaluable asset. Failing to do so could put the business at risk.”

Pure Storage has identified the five key benefits for enterprises that leverage modern data protection:

1. Overall cost savings
Cyberattacks could cost the Australian economy around $30 billion and cost a significant number of jobs, according to a AustCyber research. Affected companies suffer losses due to lost customers, lost productivity, direct remediation costs, and the costs with reputational damage if the data breach is made public. Companies affected by a data breach tend to suffer immediate drops in their stock price and, more concerningly, the stock price can continue to be affected in the long term.

By backing data up to the cloud and spreading data across more servers on- and off-premises, “organisations can mitigate the risk posed by ransomware attacks. By ensuring that data is protected by appropriate security controls, they can minimise the chances of a cyber breach”, Pure Storage suggests. This can also improve scalability because it helps save costs.

2. Operational resilience
Organisations with multiple servers both on- and off-premises for their cloud data storage need to be operationally resilient. This requires robust data protection across all servers.

Most IT consultants would tell organisations to keep sites relatively close to one another for performance reasons, however this may not always be the case. Pure Storage warns: “A disaster that affects one data centre could easily affect others nearby, so it may be advisable in some instances to choose geographically disparate data centres.”

3. Increased ability to leverage data for insights and decision-making
Better protected data includes stopping the loss of data and disruptions to data storage. If an organisation’s data keeps getting interrupted through lack of protection, then this could lead to poor performing data analytics. The quality of insights derived from data is directly related to the quality of the data itself. Therefore, protecting data is essential to maintain high quality insights and decision-making.

4. Protection against ransomware attacks
In 2020, ransomware attacks increased by 715% year-on-year. To avoid this, Pure Storage suggests, “organisations need to implement a proactive stance against cyberattacks through measures like staff training, threat hunting, and proactive network and endpoint monitoring.”

Creating an air gap for the backup environment can help safeguard against ransomware attacks on the backup. These attacks still happen, and can be addressed by adding SafeMode snapshots to protect backup data for example. In case of any ransomware attack, organisations can recover data directly from these protected backups. This also helps guard against rogue administrators.

5. Compliance with data privacy laws
Australian organisations must comply with the Privacy Act and notifiable data breach policy. If they have European partners or customers, they must also comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). These laws outline how organisations must collect, maintain, use, and delete data. Organisations could face penalties and fines if they fail to comply. Compliance will reduce the risk of data breach and position the company as a leader in maintaining customer data privacy.

Sunil Chavan concludes: “Effective data protection and storage is table stakes in a world that depends more heavily on data every day. Organisations that take a modern, proactive approach to data governance will achieve significant benefits that will position them to lead the market into the future.”