If last year was anything to go by, probably not. After all, 2020 did an excellent job of illuminating all the ways that data protection could go wrong. Here, Sarah Doherty, product marketing manager at iland highlights some important changes to consider while we continue to endure the ‘new normal’.

Ransomware took off on a steady incline throughout the year with record numbers of data theft, corruption, etc.

Data sprawl and cloud access to data have also become threats, as many employees moved to remote work and expanded companies’ potentially vulnerable data environments. 

Organisations are paying more attention to security and data protection issues while utilising cloud to better manage and protect their critical data. 

More privacy laws mean increased costs for data management 

With many countries and other agencies either passing legislation or considering bills to strengthen privacy, organisations need to prepare their business for the efforts needed to satisfy these regulations while also ensuring that their data is compliant, protected and available at all times. 

Better management of stored data 

Companies have historically collected and stored data as a way to future-proof the business. However, data breaches have shown that unprotected data can be a massive liability to any organisation.

With companies increasingly monitoring employees, especially with the increase in remote work following the pandemic, security is not just about consumers, but about employees.

In many cases, the best approach is to identify every process and application that collects data, and determine whether that information needs to be retained, immediately available or discarded. 

Data protection now has the CEO’s ear 

With a greater awareness of data privacy and security issues, organisations are paying more attention to compliance requirements. Being compliant in the cloud is more important than ever before.

The result is pressure on chief data officers (CDOs), data scientists, and marketing executives to pay more attention to how data is handled across the organisation. 

Data resilience is the way forward 

Traditionally, data recovery and security has focused on keeping data confidential while protecting from data breaches and securing intellectual property from theft.

However, 2020 has reinforced that data protection needs to also focus on the integrity and availability of data, especially with the rise of disinformation and frequency of ransomware attacks. 

Organisations should source a cloud service provider that offers secure and compliant hosting, that can confidently migrate an organisation to the cloud in order to achieve their cloud data protection goals in 2021.