The Importance of Protecting Data in the Digital Economy

With the influx of new-age technologies in our day-to-day lives and work, it has become imperative for organisations to increase their focus on their practical application. Given today’s technology-driven landscape, data is the atom of our world – the particle that holds all the information we need and rely on for living without interruptions. From instructing voice assistants to performing tasks, ‘driving’ driverless cars, mobilising up-and-coming 5G mobile networks, and using security surveillance powered by artificial intelligence, data is the currency required for the digital economy to transact.

However, in conversations around enabling data-driven businesses, there are a few implications that leaders will have to bear in mind as they look to harness the opportunities in the digital economy, especially around data security.

Leveraging cloud for enhanced data protection and agility

Organisations in APJ region remained at heightened risks of cyberattacks, with hackers 80 percent more likely to attack organisations in Asia. In India itself, 69 percent of the companies are at risk of a cyber-attack. In fact, in 2018, 53 percent of all cyber-attacks led to financial damages of more than $500K (including lost revenue, customers, opportunities, and out-of-pocket costs among others) for organisations in India, as per a recent study titled Global Data Protection Index.

As organisations strive to meet business demands while protecting proprietary information, building a data protection strategy that can flex to cover their on and off premises data is critical. The study revealed that about 32 percent of companies in India believe that their current data protection solutions will meet all future challenges.

Business leaders know that a robust data protection strategy is one of the cornerstones of long term business success. In India, 69 percent of organisations acknowledge the importance of scalablity options for data protection solutions in a public cloud environment and 59 percent are using cloud-enabled version of on-premises data protection software to protect their public cloud workloads.

Drive data protection strategies for organisational profitability and long-term data health

In a connected world, downtime as well as data loss can have a huge impact and, in some cases, cripple businesses.

The study highlighted that about 7 in 10 organisations in India have experienced a disruption in activities due to data breaches in the past 12 months, and 30 percent experienced irreparable data loss, about 11 percent more than what it was in 2016. In the last 12 months, organisations in India that have lost data have forgone an astounding of 3.31TB, which had a price tag of more than one million dollars ($1,287,788). Therefore, organisations must reiterate the importance of data and file back-up not just in the cloud, but also on physical devices.

Prevalence of emerging technologies is driving data-intensive workloads

The value of data is increasing as is the realization that we can create a new world of smarter products, better customer experiences, self-learning and digital services that are continually improving. Compounding this increase is the adoption of emerging technologies like IoT, AI/ML which are all incredibly data heavy putting pressure across the network, from the edge, to the core to the cloud. This explosion of data comes with the added complexity that it must all be moved, stored, analysed, and most importantly, protected. However, more than half (52 percent) of organisations in India have admitted that new technologies such as AI/ML are areas which they are struggling to find suitable data protection solutions for their businesses.

Therefore as organisations realize the importance of data and consider it as the rocket fuel for future innovations, they have already started making big investments in new-age technologies along with ensuring that their IT infrastructures can be modernised to support and protect these newer and rising workloads. Time and again, it has been established that the ability to harness, store, share, analyse and most importantly, protect this data, will be the prime difference between companies leading the industry and those who fall behind the curve.

Ripu Bajwa
Director & General Manager - Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, India