India’s path to digital transformation has accelerated manifold in the past few months. While many businesses had already realised the importance of transforming themselves, it became a priority for them only after they were forced to entirely change their working models, due to the pandemic. It was not surprising to note that those who had already made digital transformation their priority, were able to seamlessly transition and stay ahead of their competitors.
“As these businesses worked towards maintaining continuity, while quickly shifting to a remote working style, they faced certain concerns, in the process,” says Ripu Bajwa, director and general manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies, India. “One of the major concern areas included the protection of their most valuable asset—data. In fact, due to lack of preparedness, many businesses fell prey to cybercriminals who were able to sneak into their IT systems, leading to data breaches.”
According to Bajwa, to avoid such instances, businesses will need to plan for any possible threat scenario. If overlooked, data loss has the potential to cripple unprepared businesses in no time. Bajwa stresses that this is only possible when businesses prioritise the protection of their data by implementing new-age data protection solutions that have the power to deflect any harm caused by cybersecurity threats.
Currently, new modern infrastructure, be it on-premises or cloud, are increasingly becoming the standards for successful IT operations. “Here, securely moving business-critical data to an isolated environment via an operational air gap becomes critical. While this may only represent a fraction of the data, it provides the last line of defence with additional controls and inspection, to further counter the threat of cyber-attacks,” he informs.
The air gap is both physical (via a locked room on-prem, in an off-prem or cloud-based vault) and logical (data and management path, command and control access). This brings a level of protection for rapidly expanding critical data by protecting the production surface where data is being generated as well as the backup infrastructure where the duplicate of the data is stored.
Businesses need to deploy trusted data protection and cybersecurity solutions that help them establish policy-driven automated workflows to move business-critical data into an isolated environment and lock it down. According to the Dell official, this can be termed as the ultimate protection for a business’ DNA and is called a cyber vault. With this strategy, backup data will help businesses recover in a short amount of time. Ultimately, businesses will have the convenience and flexibility to support any change that may come their way, whether a cybersecurity threat or an agile business need. “It becomes a prerequisite for businesses to be aligned with the changing technology landscape and equip themselves with best-in-class solutions,” he adds.
