By Rajesh Chhabra, Sales Director, Acronis India
Data is now our most important asset, and guarding it has become a basic human need. The amount of data doubles every two years and traditional solutions for data protection are criminally outdated. Data protection without cyber security has become obsolete. The new era has come – it’s the era of cyber protection.
Cyber protection rests on five key vectors: Safety, Accessibility, Privacy, Authenticity, Security – or SAPAS, as we’ve coined the term. The new approach must address the Five Vectors of Cyber Protection, known by the acronym SAPAS. When one of the vectors gives in and fails – that’s when disaster strikes.
Safety: Ensure that a reliable copy of your data is always available
Accessibility: Make your data easily available to you from anywhere at any time
Privacy: Control who has visibility and access to your data
Authenticity: Have undeniable proof copy of your data, an exact replica of the original
Security: Protect your data, applications, and systems against malicious threats
To cover all five vectors is a challenge. While each of these vectors are important, they often compete with one another. For instance, locking a hard drive inside a vault guarantees data’s safety and privacy, however, makes it inaccessible and therefore useless from a practical standpoint.
SAPAS allows a user to manage data as per the latest standards and business needs. However, there are three key challenges data owners are facing: data complexity, data security and data storage costs. Neither data protection, nor cyber security have a way to solve those problems – but right in between, where data protection and cyber security merge, lies the new approach: Cyber protection.
Backup is dead. There is no “just backup” anymore, it’s useless in the modern cyber landscape. Companies need to think about protection in a non-static way. One needs to be able to prevent problems, respond to them and recover from them. We’re currently in a state where mobile devices are being broken into, we’re losing privacy, our authenticity. It’s happening with businesses, both big and small. As a result, consumers need to think about how they protect their data, applications and systems.
Sadly, cyber-attacks have become automated and industrialized – the cost of an attack nowadays is very low. An intruder doesn’t need to spend too much money – one can attack many people at once, it could even be managed by Artificial Intelligence (AI). Ransomware alone now attacks someone every fourteen seconds, as per the 2017-2019 Global Ransomware Statistics thereby, crippling businesses, hospitals and government offices.
According to Hiscox’ annual Cyber Readiness Report 2020, seven out of ten companies hit by ransomware, admit not being ready to respond to an attack and end up paying the price: USD 13,000 on average for the ransom itself, plus USD 250,000 per hour – which is the average cost of unplanned downtime. We are all targets, but the people at most risk are small and medium businesses and consumers – because unlike enterprises, they just don’t have the resources for a proper cyber protection solution.
The demand for cyber security will only continue peaking in 2020 – in India, and around the world. Among other key trends in India we will see cyber protection taking over data protection, cloud migration replacing on premise storage, companies investing more into digital transformation tools and a zero-trust approach coming to replace public data sharing.
Industry analysts, like IDC, have examined the “cyber protection” approach, and are recommending organizations to adopt such an approach as part of their digital transformation – by:
Creating a cyber-protection center of excellence that focuses on data security and availability;
Embracing the strategy by integrating data protection, disaster recovery (DR), and data security;
Designing cyber protection into infrastructure architectures, not as add-ons;
And leveraging automation and AI/machine learning to better respond to cyber threats.
India is a country with a unique cyber security landscape. Having ranked the most cyber-attacked country in the world for 3 months back in 2019, it still stays among the top targets in 2020. Why is that? Due to the fundamental issues on hand, ones that the industry currently struggles with. Those issues include:
Lack of tech leadership within a company
Old-school industry approach to data protection
Low cyber threats awareness & the complete lack of fully integrated solutions
To combat those challenges one needs to start betting heavily on the adoption of integrated cyber protection solutions. Having been custom-developed to fit the new reality of business and remote work, integrated solutions are the most efficient tools at your disposal, able to help improve the overall state of IT infrastructure, decrease churn and operational costs and expand your business prospects.
