Most significant and biggest data breaches of the 21st century
These events compiled by CSO are based on the risk and damage that breach caused for companies, insurers, or account holders.
This retrospective look at the past decade also shows that the pace of hacks, breaches and leaks is accelerating and cyber threats have become almost unstoppable.
With organizations relying more and more on bits and bytes, value of data has increased significantly but consequences of not backing up data, being multiple and scary (downtime, reputational damage, lost productivity and finally business shut down) necessitates the need for-
- Real improvements in the management of risks and increased levels of IT security.
- Data protection, file backups and ensured system restoration.
- To realize the significance of backup and disaster recovery solutions.
As per National Archives & Records Administration in Washington, 93% of companies that lost their data center for 10 days or more due to a disaster filed for bankruptcy within one year of the disaster. 50% of businesses that found themselves without data management for this same time period filed for bankruptcy immediately.
So, the time for pondering over questions like why is data backup necessary or why should I backup data or how to backup and which is the best enterprise backup solution for me, is now up. Now one should strive to make arrangements to avoid data loss in an informed way and to help you there, I have penned down this article.
What is data backup, what is disaster recovery – are they same?
Backup and disaster recovery are often confused as synonyms of each other but the difference between them is clear and distinct.
Backup is the process that involves copying of your files and data that can be used to restore the original one in the event of data loss, whereas disaster recovery enables an organization to respond quickly and resume business functions after an event of a disaster, with the help of set procedures and tools.
But, without backup, no disaster recovery is possible. Yes, backup has to be there as a prefix to the disaster recovery.
Which data sets do your organization backup?
All that has no replacement – everything from snapshots to streaming, virtualized servers, all file types, endpoints, databases, enterprise applications, media storage and data sources, should ideally be backed up.
A majority of businesses back up virtualized servers and databases. Others back up data sets that users share as well as enterprise applications, while few back up endpoint or desktop data and virtual desktops. – TechTarget Research
Related read: Top 5 hacker vulnerabilities in your systems in 2020- and how to fix them
Crucial reasons to backup your data (Importance of data backup for businesses)
Whether you are a large enterprise or an SMB (small and medium business), you must have the best data backup services or solutions in place.
1. Evolving threats will become more prevalent and malicious
As per various reports, compiled by a number of prominent figures in the IT security sector, the number of cyber-attacks has increased, as many as four times the amount occurring in 2017 than 2016.
Meanwhile, it is predicted that 2018 will also witness huge breaches, big risk ransomware attacks.
World Economic Forum’s Global Risk Report 2018 has ranked cyber-attacks as the third most likely global risk for 2018, with extreme weather conditions and natural disasters as the first and second risks, respectively.
2018 will also witness modified attacks i.e. powered with Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools – better explained by Steve Grobman, “AI, unfortunately, gives attackers the tools to get a much greater return on their investment,”. He is the Chief technology officer at McAfee.
As we all know, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, thus, prevention is considered to be the best form of protection. So, it’s important that enterprises should invest in well managed backup solutions that will empower them with the ability to prevent, detect and contain data breaches and will help them in building resilience in all plans of business setup and execution.
2. Financial losses can be big in size and seriousness
Data being the core currency of enterprises in today’s digital economy, if lost or disrupted, results in expensive downtime. Below graph* shows the average hourly cost of critical server outages. As of December 2017, 24 % of respondents worldwide reported the average hourly downtime cost of their servers to be between 301,000 to 400,000 U.S. dollars.
Average cost per hour of enterprise server downtime worldwide in 2017 and 2018
So, the cost of downtime is expected to increase significantly for companies in 2018
Thus, it is essential to consider a backup and recovery strategy to protect your mission-critical data against disruption-planned or unplanned and downtime originating from it.
Related read: 10+ Massive Healthcare Data Hacks of All Time
3. Trust & Reputation are at stake
Financial losses can be calculated but quantifying the true consequences of data breached is a bit challenging as reputation and productivity loss is immeasurable.
IDC Program Vice President, Security Products and Services, Christian A. Christiansen aptly explains one of the consequences of data loss. He says, “Consumers are starting to pull away from brands that have been breached.”
In addition to this, other effects of data loss are –
- Time is lost during recovery process.
- No new projects can be initiated.
- Delayed time to market and impacts ROI.
- It may result in a legal challenge from consumers or compliance authorities.
And the reputational damage suffered by companies who fail to protect personal data can translate directly into loss of business.
Suggested read: 15 latest e-commerce trends to watch out for in 2020
4. Big data is becoming more mission-critical in nature
Forbes reported insights from Dresner Advisory Services, indicating that Big data adoption reached 53% in 2017 up from 17 % in 2015.
No doubt, analytics tools offer insights – both predictive and prescriptive and enable companies to store piles of data for getting better business insights and for taking more informed decisions while formulating future business strategies. But, if this amount of data is breached, this may also mean massive amounts of both personal and business-critical information loss.
So when the data becomes “big data” – voluminous, complex as well as mission critical in nature, enterprises need a big data disaster recovery and backup plan as a defense mechanism against the cyberattacks or equipment failures effects.
5. Digital Transformation is dominating many C- suite and boardroom agendas
As per the Gartner predictions by 2020, 60 percent of digital businesses will suffer major service failures due to the inability of IT security teams to manage digital risk.
Today, almost every business is transitioning into a digital business and the first step to digital transformation is risk management. So, enterprises must strive to address their uptime and availability shortfalls as a digital business will need to develop a secure ecosystem that will enable it to survive threats originating from unplanned downtime caused by cyber-attacks, network outages and infrastructure failures.
Vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner, Paul Proctor explains, “Cybersecurity is a critical part of digital business with its broader external ecosystem and new challenges in an open digital world.”
So, business organizations should learn to manage the acceptable levels of digital risk while planning to protect their digital content with the best backup and disaster recovery software.
6. Endpoints are increasing in businesses
Use of laptops, smartphones and tablets by organizations is continuously increasing and so is increasing the amount of data created and stored in these devices.
Moreover, the increased velocity of cloud adoption and IoT becoming more prevalent across consumer and industry worlds will lead to more data storage on the endpoint device which will thus, require safety of these endpoint devices in 2018. Therefore, protection strategies combining backup and DR must evolve, to improve overall security. So that even if these devices are lost, your data is safe in the central repository.
Use of cloud-based data solutions is considered the best as they empower a business with geolocation and remote wipe capabilities to help them prevent any data loss and guarantee data security.
7. 2018 will see the growth of data enablement
Leveraging your data can help you improve your business capabilities- better processes, increased revenues and differentiated user experiences. Your backed-up data too can provide your business an incremental value. Breaking down the silos, you can use it for data analysis and mining, patch testing. You can use non-production data for application testing and for ensured backward compatibility of new applications.
“Now customers are starting to ask for it, so the bigger backup players are obliging,” says Jason Buffington, a data protection analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). Most of the big backup vendors have started planning to use backed up data in meantime for myriad useful purposes in 2018.
What is the best data backup and DR strategy?
A good backup strategy is the best protection layer against data loss. But if, the data protection solution is inadequate, it becomes difficult to restore systems and regain lost data and files.
Below screengrab from ESG Research reveals primary requirements of IT organizations for best backup and disaster recovery strategy – high recovery reliability, high recovery speed, high backup speed or frequency, and reduced hardware, software costs.
Above considerations and the evolving requirements of resiliency and recoverability, force IT organizations to adopt cloud backup solutions over traditional backup plans. They are willing to extend their backup storage and data archives to the cloud for certain cloud benefits like cost control, backup offsite vaulting, and archiving, achieving efficiency and meeting compliance requirements.
Cloud-based data backup is quickly gaining momentum as it offers improved and reliable backup, improved security and compliance and most importantly, reduced costs, in terms of resources. Also, it enables businesses to quickly restore normal operations, after a system failure or file loss.
Best cloud-based data backup services for businesses
Azure cloud backup is one of the best online backup solutions that needs mention here being cost-effective and enterprise-grade cloud storage service. It allows you to back up your data for, virtual machines, virtualized workloads, on-premises servers, SQL server, SharePoint server, and more.
Share your thoughts with us, please comment.
*Source:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/753938/worldwide-enterprise-server-hourly-downtime-cost/
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