May 2021

Data Protection: What Works Today Could Be Non-Compliant Tomorrow

Just because your organization’s data protection practices are compliant with current corporate policies and industry requirements, doesn’t mean they will still be next month or a year from now. The IT landscape is evolving, and, in future, third party cloud or SaaS-delivered solutions can be both the challenge and the solution.

IoT, cloud systems, applications and API integrations – data needs to travel across everything, and proper management requires a systematic approach. The world of data protection is constantly evolving as IT environments, regulations, and security risks change.

So while your current setup is compliant, it may no longer be in within some years. Most importantly, you need to stay in charge of data management and stay on top of your IT processes.

Data Protection and Compliance

Multi-Cloud Solutions Challenge Compliance

Today’s multi-cloud reality makes compliance trickier because data management, rights allocations and API integrations can ultimately assign the administrators too much user access, inadvertently turning them into a single point of failure. User credentials, rights administration and “the human factor” is often the organization’s weakest link, which is why corporate and national data protection regulations ought to require full separation of duties.

This, on the other hand, can be extremely difficult to practice, even for a large enterprise, because the backup specialists need to be isolated from the production data and thereby the daily operations.

The Solution

A third-party provider can ensure complete separation between IT environment and the backup solution on a logical and physical level. In fact, a managed service provider or third-party provider can even lower costs and strengthen security and compliance.

What Data Protection Issues Should You Expect?

Future data protection solutions will need to take some important elements to compliance into account:

Redundant backup: Ensuring that a backup of your data is stored at a second site means you can recover more quickly from an IT security incident and boosts your organization’s compliance.
Separation of duties: Separation of Duties: A principle to prevent organizations from deleting live data (primary data) and backup data simultaneously.
Advanced logging: within some sectors, like for instance the financial and medical sectors, it is important to be able to protect the integrity of your backed up data for documentation – that is to ensure that data once written cannot be altered in any way via storage methods such as WORM (write once read many).
Vendor management: Many data breaches origin of a third-party vendor, and a stricter control and vendor management is necessary compliance.
Software and endpoint management: It is demanding yet crucial to keep up with software in order to eliminate vulnerabilities.

Data Storage Needs Change

As organizations evolve and grow, their data storage needs change, as do data protection compliance requirements. So why not stay a step ahead of developments and implement stricter processes now? Waiting too long could cost your organization both time and money.