From understanding client needs to anticipating market changes, data empowers companies to optimize their operations and emphasize innovation. That said, this increased data actionability has transformed it into an attractive target for a host of malicious entities. Identity thieves, cyber terrorists, insider threats, and even competitor-sponsored threat actors are constantly devising new ways to compromise sensitive business and customer information. Additionally, companies face less-objective dangers—extreme weather, natural disasters, and geopolitical instability can all disrupt or damage data centers, leaving organizations unable to operate effectively.
With so much riding on the safety and accessibility of essential data, ensuring resilience through data protection has become a critical concern for businesses of all sizes. Data protection prioritizes the safeguarding of information, but it also takes things further: ensuring business continuity and trust in a world filled with digital threats. Data protection encompasses a broad spectrum of practices and technologies designed to secure data from unauthorized access, prevent data breaches, and mitigate damage in the unfortunate event of data loss or compromise.
The volume of business and customer data being generated, stored, and analyzed is growing at a geometric rate, making data protection more important than it has ever been. Organizations rely heavily on accurate, available information, and any interruptions or down time can severely impact even the most basic of operations. As such, a significant aspect of data protection involves ensuring quick data restoration following an event in which data is rendered inaccessible.
Additionally, with the rise of remote work, the scope of data protection has expanded. Organizations now face the challenge of securing data across varied environments—from centralized data centers and off-site cloud-based storage to remote employees' home systems and mobile devices. Ensuring data privacy and protecting it from compromise are pivotal components of these strategies.
Financial implications also underscore the importance of data protection. Data-related incidents, such as breaches or losses, can cost organizations enormously, often running into the hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of dollars per event. These costs are not limited only to immediate damage control; they extend to litigation, compliance fines, and investments in new cybersecurity measures. Preventing data theft helps avoid these costs and protects customers from the repercussions of identity theft and fraud. At the same time, effective data protection enables businesses to extract more value from their data by organizing and cataloging it for future use, thus enhancing overall operational efficiency.
Data protection plays a crucial role in privacy management. In an era where personal data is constantly collected and analyzed, individual privacy must be actively defended. Data protection policies and practices ensure organizations handle personal data in compliance with legal and ethical standards. This involves controlling access to sensitive information, employing strong encryption solutions, and implementing measures that allow for data anonymization. By doing so, organizations not only protect themselves from legal repercussions but also build trust with their customers and stakeholders, affirming their commitment to respecting and protecting personal privacy rights.
Finally, data protection is a cornerstone of business recovery. The time it takes to regain compromised data directly impacts an organization's revenue and productivity, with prolonged downtimes leading to significant financial losses and possible damage to the brand's reputation. In essence, data protection is more than a defensive strategy for countering threats; it is an enabler of sustainable business growth and operational resilience, ensuring that organizations can leverage their data assets securely and effectively regardless of circumstances.
Data protection is grounded in principles designed to safeguard data while keeping it fully available to authorized users. Forming the foundation of strategies that encompass operational backup and business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR), these principles provide insight into the comprehensive approach necessary for effective data protection:
This principle is central to ensuring that users can access the data they need for business operations. Data availability involves creating and managing redundant systems and backup processes to ensure data can be recovered and made available even in the event of system disruptions.
As previously addressed, data protection is primarily focused on safeguarding data from loss, corruption, and unauthorized access. To do this, it employs an array of practices including data backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning, ensuring the security of sensitive data as well as its availability and integrity—even in the event of unexpected incidents. Data protection is a holistic approach, considering the entire lifecycle and handling of data.
While it is often incorporated as part of a broader data protection strategy, data security is more specifically focused on defending data against unauthorized access. This includes implementing security measures to discover and deter various digital threats (internal and external).
Data privacy is also a subset of data protection. It deals with the proper handling, processing, and storage of employee, customer, and vendor personal information, focusing on ensuring compliance with the laws that dictate how personal information may be collected, used, and shared. Data privacy is about managing data ethically and legally, and with the consent of the individuals the data belongs to.
The value of data protection is widely recognized across regions and industries. Equally acknowledged is the need for established data protection strategies. Employed correctly and in a way that offers comprehensive, redundant support, the following strategies can help create an effective failsafe for essential data:
Prior to implementing any data protection controls, conducting a thorough audit of sensitive data is vital. This involves identifying what types of data the organization handles, where it is stored, and what defenses are currently in place. Classifying data based on sensitivity levels helps inform organizations regarding what protection measures may be effective and appropriate. Leveraging existing data protection systems and identifying areas for improvement are also key aspects of this strategy.
The data protection policy is the heart of the greater data protection strategy. The policy should outline exactly how the company will protect its data and the steps it will take to recover and repair lost or corrupted data. The policy must define the levels of risk tolerance for different data categories and establish clear guidelines for responsibilities related to authorization and authentication. The policy must be informed by a clear understanding of the organization's unique data environment and should serve as a guiding framework for all subsequent data protection activities.
Given the myriad of regulations governing data protection across different regions and industries, developing a compliance strategy is always advisable. This strategy should address specific legal requirements, ensuring that the organization's data protection practices align with these regulations. If they do not, the organizations risk potential penalties, fines, and loss of consumer trust.
There are many threats that must be regularly assessed if a company is to understand how to counter and recover from them. Risk assessment involves identifying potential vulnerabilities within the IT infrastructure, such as weak passwords or inadequate access controls, alongside malicious attacks from the full range of threat vectors. Understanding these risks allows organizations to tailor their data protection measures to address dangers effectively.
An organization's security strategy should establish measures to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data while ensuring that any protection policies do not unnecessarily impede employee productivity or data accessibility. It includes deploying advanced security technologies, managing effective backups to ensure data availability and business continuity, and consistently updating security protocols to counter emerging threats.
Digital threats continue to evolve, and to remain viable, data protection must adapt alongside them. This continuous progression in data protection is marked by several emerging trends, each addressing unique aspects of data security and management:
CDM minimizes the number of data copies an organization needs to maintain, thereby reducing storage overhead and simplifying data management and protection. CDM enhances productivity and lowers administrative costs through automation and centralized control. The next step in CDM evolution is likely to involve integrating it with intelligent data management platforms, allowing for more efficient, smart, and secure data handling.
Modern IT infrastructures are beginning to rely increasingly on the ability to move data seamlessly between different environments and software applications—including between on-premises data centers and various cloud providers. Data portability also relates directly to data sovereignty, where data stored across different countries is subject to varying legal regulations. In the years to come, the ability to address challenges related to sovereignty and portability will become a major competitive advantage.
In-house data recovery can be an expensive, time-consuming process. DRaaS is gaining popularity as a practical and cost-effective alternative. This approach, where an organization will hire professional data-recovery services who then create a cloud-based replica of the company's internal systems, is increasingly being used for those businesses than need something more extensive than just local data backup. DRaaS offers businesses a way to quickly recover from data loss incidents without the need for extensive in-house disaster recovery infrastructure.
Hyper-convergence is an approach to IT that combines computing, networking, and storage in a single system, with the goal of improving scalability while reducing data-center complexity. Organizations are integrating data protection capabilities more extensively into their hyper-converged infrastructures, as these solutions provide enhanced backup, disaster recovery, archiving, and other functions for secondary storage while simplifying integration with cloud environments.
With ransomware becoming more sophisticated, traditional backup methods are no longer fully reliable. Modern ransomware can infiltrate and corrupt backups over time, making recovery challenging. Consequently, vendors are adapting their backup and recovery products to better detect and isolate ransomware, ensuring the integrity of their backup data.
Mobile computing has become integral to business operations; protecting and recovering the sensitive data stored on these devices is just as important. Mobile data protection involves securing and backing up sensitive information on smartphones, tablets, and other portable systems, and takes the form of secure communications practices, strong identity verification, limitations on software and website usage, data encryption, and regular security audits.
Data collection and application in business is nearly universal. Unfortunately, this represents a danger to those whose data may be unethically exploited. Data protection and privacy laws exist to protect the privacy rights of individuals and to set enforceable standards for data handling by organizations. Key data protection and privacy laws include:
Enacted in May 2018, GDPR is one of the most stringent privacy and security laws in the world. It imposes obligations on organizations across the globe—if any group targets or collects data related to people of the European Union, GDPR has authority. The regulation has set a high standard for data privacy worldwide.
Effective from January 2020 (with additional privacy protections added in 2023), the CCPA provides California residents with the right to know about the personal data collected about them and whether their data is being sold or disclosed. It also grants them the right to prevent the sale of their data and request the deletion of any personal information from company data storage without risking discrimination for exercising these rights.
Enacted on January 1, 2023, Virginia's CDPA introduces rigorous data privacy protections for residents of Virginia. The CDPA grants consumers rights such as access, correction, deletion, and data portability of their personal information. It emphasizes consent for processing sensitive data and introduces strict responsibilities for data controllers and processors in securing personal data.
One of the older data-protection laws, PIPEDA has been in effect since 2000 and governs how Canadian private sector organizations collect, use, and disclose personal information. Under PIPEDA, individuals have the right to access and verify their personal information held by an organization and to challenge its accuracy. Data must be collected by fair and lawful means, with consent, and used only for the purposes for which it was collected.
Effective since August 2020, Brazil's LGPD mirrors the GDPR in many ways, focusing on the rights of data subjects and the obligations of data processors and controllers. The law applies to any business or organization that processes the personal data of individuals in Brazil, regardless of the organization’s location. It grants individuals rights such as access to data, correction, deletion, and the right to withdraw consent. The LGPD also establishes a national data protection authority (the ANPD), which is responsible for enforcing the law.Beyond these, there are similar laws in many other countries and US states, with the number constantly expanding. Each jurisdiction brings its unique perspective and requirements, creating a complex tapestry of global data protection and privacy laws. This growing trend is captured in a prediction from Gartner, forecasting that 75% of the world’s population will have its personal data protected under modern privacy regulations by the end of 2024.
Effective data protection is crucial not only for compliance with global regulations but also for maintaining customer trust and ensuring business resilience in the face of unexpected events. ServiceNow, a leading voice in IT management and industry leader as recognized by Forrester Wave, is setting the gold standard for managing the risk to data protection programs.
ServiceNow addresses comprehensive risk challenges with its Integrated Risk Management (IRM) solution, particularly vital in heavily regulated industries. IRM unifies risk, compliance, policy, and audit management, providing a holistic view that helps organizations proactively tackle potential threats, making it possible for businesses to adhere to strict regulatory requirements while protecting against operational and financial vulnerabilities.
ServiceNow Business Continuity Management (BCM) empowers organizations to plan and respond to crises efficiently and effectively, allowing users to visualize crisis impacts, manage disaster information, and maintain continuity plans through seamless integration with the ServiceNow CMD
Lastly, ServiceNow Privacy Management integrates privacy by design, automating workflows to monitor and protect data privacy across the entire enterprise. By implementing these advanced data protection and privacy management tools, companies in all industries can significantly enhance their operational efficiency and resilience.
Data is at the center of your business, so it makes sense to prioritize data protection and privacy in your business strategy. Demo ServiceNow today, and see where reliable data protection and privacy management can take you.