The familiar concepts of offense (proactive, advancing a team’s objectives) and defense (reactive, preventing others from achieving their goals) are often heard in the world of sports. They can also apply to the technologies you use in your business.
In data security and data management, for example, you need a proactive solution that maximizes the value of all of your data and helps you discover issues before they become a problem. You also require a solution that helps you react quickly by recovering your organization’s data after an unauthorized breach such as a ransomware attack.
A single vendor-managed data security and data management platform effectively allows your organization to continuously function on offense and defense at the same time.
Playing offense with your data
Organizations have plenty of data. Statista calculates enterprises will create, consume, and store more than 180 zettabytes by 2025. What most organizations don’t have (and desperately need when the economic outlook dims) is an ideal way to maximize the value of all their data. That’s where data security and data management as cloud services shine.
If you’re uncertain whether a vendor-managed data security and management solution is right for achieving your organization’s objectives, ask yourself three important questions:
- Can you simply manage and secure your data in a multicloud environment?
- Does your team spend more time on innovation than day-to-day operational tasks?
- Is your current architecture able to cost-effectively scale and meet your current and future business needs?
If you answered “no” even once, it’s nearly impossible for your business to be putting all of its data to work. You can close that gap by consolidating your data in a managed cloud. Let’s get into what limitless potential an offensive strategy can offer.
Proactive vendor-managed data security and management
Traditional approaches to data security and management silo all your growing enterprise data so that you have to purchase and use different hardware and software to manage structured and unstructured data. Although that model can help safeguard your data, it also adds complexity. Different user interfaces don’t help make all your data visible and easy to reuse.
In contrast, vendor-managed data security and management is a cloud-centric platform approach that radically simplifies how you back up, secure, govern, and analyze all your data. That includes cloud-native, SaaS, and on-premises data in all kinds of forms including structured files and objects, as well as unstructured text and multimedia, surveillance footage, virtual machines, persistent volumes, and more—no matter where it resides.
In partnership with a cloud service provider, you get easy access to multiple data management capabilities, such as backup and recovery, cyber vaulting, disaster recovery (DR), archiving, advanced threat intelligence, machine learning (ML)-based data classification, data security, and analytics—all provided as a comprehensive, integrated set of offerings in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. And simplicity is just the beginning of the advantages your enterprise gains from teaming with an expert provider of elastic, hyperscale cloud infrastructure.
With vendor-managed data security and management services, you also get a host of other features that help you proactively:
- Protect and isolate your data with an air-gapped cyber vault
- Reduce downtime during a disaster
- Classify your data
- Move faster to a cloud operational model
- Drive continuous improvement, ongoing optimization, and innovation
Playing defense against cybercriminals
The same data your organization is hoping to gain insights into is a target for attack. Individual bad actors and nation-states are increasingly focused on cyber threats that could disrupt your operations to extort large ransom payments. Global ransomware damage costs (revenue, productivity, and rebuilding losses combined) are predicted to exceed $265B by 2031, according to Cybersecurity Ventures, so you can’t afford to neglect taking defensive actions.
Backup as a service (BaaS) is the most popular cloud service offering for simultaneously accelerating offensive capabilities and fortifying defenses. It’s ideal for safeguarding your data for business and compliance reasons. As you and your team evaluate BaaS offerings, it’s important to understand they aren’t all the same, and you may just be creating additional silos in the cloud. In most shared responsibility models, cloud providers take care of the physical cloud infrastructure only. You must oversee securing, managing, and backing up your data.
You’ll want to choose a BaaS offering that runs atop a comprehensive data security and management platform because only then will you be able to proactively safeguard a wide variety of data sources (cloud-native, SaaS, on-prem) and consistently manage protected data in your multicloud environment while mitigating downtime.
With ransomware concerns increasing, any BaaS offering you choose should be able to:
- Continuously counter ransomware threats
- Rapidly recover from a ransomware attack
- Take advantage of third-party key management services to prevent unauthorized access
Where you used to have to move and copy data to do new things on separate compute infrastructure, you can now bring near-infinite amounts of compute power in the cloud to your data. That gives your IT operators, analysts, and developers more powerful ways to keep ransomware from disrupting operations while you derive insights from previously hidden data—again, maximizing the value of your data. Because a platform will also introduce new services and applications continuously, you’ll be able to keep unlocking more value from your data and more effectively secure data in the face of rising cyber threats.
Why choose a cloud approach?
There are four significant advantages to choosing cloud services for data security and data management offense and defense.
Reduce operational burdens
With cloud services, your organization gets optimal management flexibility and control over policies, customer service-level agreements (SLAs), and insights without having to take care of data center infrastructure. No more wasting valuable technical innovation time and budget on:
- Hardware, such as servers, storage, and networking
- Network usage including data egress and transfers
- Data center power and cooling
- Infrastructure redundancy
- Software purchases, updates, and patches
- Online support
- Administration and maintenance of all the above components
A cloud approach cuts complexity and the operational headaches of fragmented data, and without all of the “extras” required to manage it. Thus your team is free to focus on the data itself. And it helps your team achieve your multicloud and hybrid cloud objectives because instead of creating new silos, it lets you seamlessly manage data sources from both onsite and off-site sources and consolidate them in the cloud without requiring you and your team to change tools or user interfaces.
Optimize and predict costs
When you opt for cloud services on a unified platform, you eliminate costly infrastructure silos and help redirect your budget to innovation. Cloud services for data security and management let you keep and quickly locate and use unlimited structured and unstructured data to stay ahead of your competition while cutting out extraneous copies of data using advanced deduplication technology. You enjoy capacity-based pricing in a pay-as-you-grow model that comes in a monthly cloud bill.
With cloud services, you eliminate procurement’s hard-to-predict resource and capacity cycle forecasting. This is a more predictable model that goes on the balance sheet as an operational (OpEx) expense, not a capital (CapEx) expense.
Lower risk
Managed cloud services also strengthen data protection because it’s easier to secure a single platform than multiple silos. Managed cloud services can offer all of the critical capabilities to defend your data against ransomware attacks—from snapshot immutability and WORM (write once, read many) to role-based access and multifactor authentication to instant mass restore recovery as well as ML-powered anomaly detection—your organization can more confidently refuse to pay the ransom.
Drive innovation
If you’re considering the move to the cloud for data security and management, cloud services make it simpler. Protect and collect your data in the BaaS service without disrupting production environments. Then use your data backed up in the cloud to easily restore or migrate app workloads or data that you want to move to the cloud or to failover for disaster recovery. From there, your authorized cloud applications and transformation projects can reach cloud data to boost productivity. With your data all collected and protected together in a single cloud services platform, you can search and analyze all of it faster in the cloud. That fuels insights and the type of continuous improvement, small “i” innovation your business is counting on this year.
Ensure your organization is ready to play offense and defense when it comes to data security and data management. Learn more about Cohesity Cloud Services.
