With cybercrime up 600% due to COVID-19 in 2020, according to a recent study, 73% of IT leaders are more concerned than ever about protecting their data from ransomware, according to a survey by Druva. The most obvious threat vector is employees, with 57% of IT decision makers fearing that remote workers will expose their firm to the risk of a data breach.
Meanwhile, to stay competitive, organisations are shifting to “cloud-first” strategies to accelerate their digital transformation. With so much work to be done, they are adopting SaaS applications to offload anything that does not add business value. The result is that applications and data are sprawled across the globe, making data protection more difficult than ever before.
Organisations find themselves at a crossroads. Data regulations have never been more complex, cyber hackers more sophisticated, and data protection more important. But with so many business-critical initiatives, they cannot spend more time and money on their data protection solution.
How can you protect more data in more places from more threats with less time and money? The answer is zero touch data protection.
Why data protection is so complex
Data protection has always been complex, and data sprawl, data growth, and increased threats have increased the size of the challenges:
Managing hardware and software - Hardware maintenance, software upgrades, and maintaining version compatibility between business applications, backup software, and hardware.
Responding to users - For every new VM, a database, or NAS share, a backup administrator must assign a backup policy and schedule. Every time a user or application owner needs to recover data, a backup administrator needs to respond.
Scaling the solution - The inexact science of capacity planning leads to overprovisioning and underutilisation of resources.
Now, with data sprawl, organisations have to create protection solutions for each data centre, remote office, cloud VPC, and SaaS application. Teams that were barely managing are completely overwhelmed.
Data protection is complex because the solutions were architected 30 years ago, when organisations built their own data centres. “Simplifying” data protection demands approach and a new architecture.
Zero touch, zero complications
Organisations should be able to protect their data, wherever it lives, so they can focus on moving the business forward. Just as organisations shifted to SaaS for customer relationship management (CRM), IT service management (ITSM), and HR Operations, they are shifting to data protection as a service (DPaaS).
The journey to zero touch data protection begins with one statement - “we don’t want to build and run our own data protection environment anymore.” A zero-touch data protection solution should have:
No hardware or software required - The hardware and software management in zero touch data protection is done by the service provider, not you.
Self-service - Application, database, and virtualisation administrators should be able to protect and recover their data, while the protection service ensures that service levels and retention requirements are met.
Auto-scaling - The solution scales on-demand to meet your needs. It should scale up and down, so you only pay for what you use, when you use it.
Central management with regional support - The centralised service protects all data sources, including data centres, cloud, endpoints, edge, and SaaS applications, but enables the data to be protected in local regions, to meet compliance and performance requirements.
Zero touch data protection is one solution for all your applications and data, with no provisioning, maintenance, or capacity planning.
How to begin
Despite the threats and regulations, the fragile and expensive backup infrastructure, and the appeal of zero touch data protection, most organisations still struggle to prioritise protection. Therefore, it can be useful to start with a simple step, then expand.
Many teams first adopt zero touch data protection for new applications and environments. Rather than struggling to expand their existing solution for cloud environments and new applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Kubernetes, they adopt a new approach.
Others start with ransomware protection. The new cyberthreats demand a solution that automatically stores data offsite, detects potential attacks, and simplifies rapid recovery. Instead of trying to retrofit full ransomware protection onto their existing solution, the organisation deploys zero touch data protection.
The future is here
While many companies still view data protection as an insurance policy, leading organisations are using it to enhance their corporate reputation. Every organisation has to withstand the relentless barrage of cyberattacks to avoid data loss, service outages, and brand damage, but an investment in data management can build trust with your customers. Customers with zero touch data protection are transparent with their approach to privacy, data management, and data protection, so that their customers know that they can trust them with their data and their business.
In 2021, data protection does not need to be a complex, expensive, insurance policy. With zero touch data protection, it can be a simple, cost-effective, business asset.
