Data Protection Solutions for the Digital Era
The technological innovations over the years have given birth to data storage in digital form. Whatever be the type of data, this forms the foundation of information and is a valuable asset for every business enterprise. In fact today’s digital data is as valuable as the currency as any loss in data leads to heavy losses in business which may further lead to business discontinuity.
Data protection thus becomes quite imperative and enterprises need to take adequate measures to ensure sensitive business data is safe from unauthorized access. The use of data protection solutions may sound simple. However, in the era of globalization and widespread use of the computer networks and availability of technology to easily access data from any device, protection of the vast digital data goes far beyond creating a backup. The advent of social media, mobile and cloud technologies paves way for cyber threats and data leakage. Enterprise thus need to adhere to the privacy and compliance regulations as part of effective data protection methods.
The complexity of data protection solutions is based on the fact that there are a number of data copying techniques and large amount of digital data that needs to be protected. The ever-changing requirement on the part of the customers leads to development of newer applications with new set of data. Creating a backup of all the data and files may work out expensive for the enterprise.
However the foremost step towards developing data protection solutions is understanding the method of data loss. In a digital environment, data loss can happen due to physical causes, human errors, natural disasters that might effect the entire data center or even corruption of software or data due to the presence of bugs and viruses.
As part of disaster recovery and business continuity solutions, the global enterprises have used technological innovations to access and transfer business crucial data and information across to various regions even through mobile devices. With such anytime anywhere access available, the enterprises need to deploy effective identity access management measures to ensure mobile security.
Leading service providers have thus developed comprehensive data protection solutions, that works in a three phased manner :
- Strategy and Design-phase which analyzes and evaluates the data security needs of the enterprise leading to designing of data classification and a data protection framework to help enterprises address present and emerging technologies such mobility, cloud and BYOD.
- Control and Integration phase for implementation of database access monitoring, information rights management and data leakage prevention methods.
- Sustenance and Optimization phase includes fine tuning and optimization of data protection solution as per the business requirements. The incident management framework ensures continued vigilance for data protection.
Implementing a compact data protection solution through data lifecycle will ensure a more holistic and modular approach to security of data.