Protecting Your Business-Critical Data in the Data-Driven Economy

We live in a data-driven economy. Organizations use their data to run operations, make informed business decisions, improve customer service, and more. The influence of data is generally positive, but it can also be detrimental to a business if a serious disruption – such as a cyberattack, insider threat, or storage platform-specific hack or bug – were to occur.

If your organization was a victim of one of these scenarios and suddenly lacked access to data repositories, would you be able to continue operations?

A copy of your data is really a duplicate of your company. If you don’t have access to business-critical data, you can’t do business. If you are unfortunate enough to be attacked, you need to make sure you have the flexibility to restore your data quickly and to any target. During these attacks, other copies of your data may be unavailable for quite some time. You’ll need to get your business-critical apps up and running as fast as possible to resume business; consider adding an extra layer of protection for business-critical data – a “golden copy,” so to speak.

Identifying Business-Critical Data

Organizations with petabytes of data may initially find it difficult to identify which datasets are classified as business critical. Business-critical data will look different depending on the industry; generally, it’s any data absolutely needed to continue running your business.

Recently, a major fitness watchmaker experienced a massive outage, leaving users disconnected from their applications for days after suffering a ransomware attack. No one was able to access their user history from the application, leaving the organization unable to continue operations. The application data would be considered business-critical data in this scenario; it’s exactly the type of data that needs to be protected and accessible.

The Role Air Gapping Plays in Completing Traditional Disaster Recovery

Once an organization identifies its business-critical data, it can move forward by adding an additional air-gap solution as an extra layer to their traditional business continuity plan. An air-gap solution – storing your data in a bunker site (whether on-premises or in the cloud) that is isolated from your network – adds an extra layer of security against both insider and external threats.

An air-gap solution removes control of the golden copy of this business-critical data from any employee or department. Instead, control is shifted to a limited set of cyber-protection administrators, often under the auspices of the legal department or risk management department. In order to open the bunker site, there should be a specific set of protocols in place. Organizations can set the number of steps in the pipeline. The harder data is to access, the harder it is to attack it. Moving control of the golden copy to very strict procedures prevents any malicious insiders from attacking data.

An air-gap solution not only gives you a golden copy of your most important data, it also gives you an all-important copy of your company as well. The air gap gives organizations the security of knowing they are protected from attackers whether from within or outside of the company. It gives organizations the ability and flexibility to get back up and running as fast as possible.

In a data-driven economy, attacks on data have the ability to cripple business. Adding a golden copy of business-critical data gives organizations peace of mind, and the power to not miss a beat in the midst of a crisis.

How to Purchase DobiProtect to Create Your Golden Copy

For organizations looking to create a golden copy of their data, DobiProtect^® can be purchased as software only or delivered as a service. For more information, please visit the DobiProtect product page.