The final installment in a blog series covering the top five CIO best practices
Modern enterprises rely on data to drive decision-making, fuel innovation, and strengthen competitive advantage. With the increasing sophistication of cyber threats and the growing complexity of IT environments, protecting and securing this critical data is getting more challenging — and more crucial — all the time.
As stewards of enterprise technology and data, most CIOs follow certain best practices for data protection that can better secure corporate data, speed provisioning of data protection solutions, reduce operational complexity and costs, make the best use of infrastructure investments, improve data service levels, improve the visibility and management of end-to-end operations, and lower total costs.
After working with CIOs for so long, we outlined those practices in our white paper “5 Best Practices CIOs Are Using to Modernize Enterprise Data Protection.” We also delved into each practice in our blogs. To close out this blog series, here’s a quick summary:
This practice is all about choosing a data protection solution that provides the utmost security in the face of constantly changing threats. The very architecture of the solution itself should be designed with security in mind rather than bolting on security features and leaving vulnerability gaps. The solution should come with user- friendly protection and restore capabilities that help to prevent — or mitigate the impact of — compromised data.
Rapid provisioning is a must for implementing enterprise data protection quickly and with minimal effort. Modernized techniques such as cloud services and SaaS models can help because they make it easy to scale up or down to accommodate fluctuations in demand from across the enterprise. Plus, enterprises can pay only for features and capacities they use — even shifting from a capex to an opex pricing model if they choose.
Intelligent automation in data protection learns best practices and then uses intelligent analytics to consistently apply automatic updates and deep expert knowledge across the entire landscape. Automation is especially critical when people with limited expertise must manage an expanding collection of data and the growing complexity of hybrid infrastructure. With the right data protection tools, automation is a means to a greater goal: not just speed, efficiency, and cost savings, but the ability to reduce risk, capture data more comprehensively, improve the customer experience, and ultimately enable innovation.
Modern businesses must continually provide better data service levels at lower costs. One reason is because it’s common to charge all departments or businesses within the enterprise for the IT and data protection services they use. In this regard, intelligent automation and optimization go hand in hand. Smart CIOs know to look for tools with proper analytics that can appropriately categorize, manage, provision, and charge for different types of business data, rather than overprovisioning across the enterprise and charging some departments for more than they need. By optimizing infrastructure and operations, you can improve data service levels at tremendous cost savings.
This one is all about manageability and accountability. When you can see and control your entire data protection operation at all times, you gain insight that helps you deliver what you promise and prove compliance. Your data protection solution should deliver visibility, reporting, and control in a comprehensive and unified way ... so you can not just manage your data but make it work for the business.
Evaluating your data protection infrastructure, operations, and processes against these best practices could help you decide which steps to take to reduce the risk of cyber events, improve the robustness of your backup infrastructure, and lower the costs of your data protection practices.
Cobalt Iron Compass uses all these best practices and more. Contact us to get started.
< Back to Blog