Part of a blog series covering the top five CIO best practices
According to CBS News, “1.5 million cyber attacks occur every year, which translates to over 4,000 attacks every day, 170 every hour, or nearly three every minute.” The analysts at Cybersecurity Ventures predict that the global cost of cyber crime will reach $10.5 trillion per year by 2025. If that’s not good enough reason to make your data security ironclad, then what is?
In fact, protecting and securing data tops Cobalt Iron’s list of the five CIO best practices, which we’ve gleaned from a long history of working with enterprises on technology that safeguards data while streamlining backup processes.
These days, there’s no way to do data security without the aid of technology tools. And while it’s impossible to be 100% certain your data is safe all the time, a modern data security solution can offer user-friendly protection and restore capabilities that help to prevent — or mitigate the impact of — compromised data.
When looking for a data security solution, CIOs who follow best practices would do well to look for one with the following characteristics.
- Architecture With Security As a Core Competency — It all starts with the architecture, which should give a holistic view of the entire data center and incorporate appropriate security features and functionality at its core, not as add-ons. A data protection solution with built-in security is stronger and less expensive than a legacy solution. Look for a tool that provides automated and monitored backups of data, inaccessible backup infrastructure, cyber attack monitoring, secure data protection (including encryption in flight and at rest), system and data integrity verification, locked-down authentication controls, redundant instances in secure data centers, and air-gapped copies of data.
- Managed Data Protection — If you choose a world-class security solution with a company of experts behind it, you’ll get a host of security features to protect key data. Built-in features can include fully humanless backup automation that’s inaccessible to enterprise interference, policy-driven service levels to ensure your data is being protected, end-to-end data governance, visibility and reporting to understand how your data is secured, full encryption schemes, support for isolated landscapes for validation and recovery, and more.
- Zero Access® — The tool should tightly control, or even eliminate, access to IT hardware, software, or data resources. Zero trust, which requires granting access, is a good start, but the emerging new Zero Access standard is even better. Through automation, Zero Access eliminates access to certain IT resources altogether.
- Readiness — Thwarting attacks and avoiding exposure requires a solution that’s always ready for anything. Readiness includes continuous data and infrastructure lockdown, vigilant 24/7 monitoring, proactive problem avoidance, and automated software currency.
- Responsiveness and Recovery — In a security incident, the extent of the damage depends largely on how quickly you act. Readiness features play a big role. You should also look for a solution that can quickly detect cyber events and that keeps a trusted, protected copy of key data safe so that the enterprise can respond quickly to a breach and begin recovery immediately. Rapid restore functions and analytics-driven insights streamline the recovery process and help to fortify data protection against future attacks.
Cobalt Iron Compass meets all of these criteria and more. Hundreds of data custodians around the world rely on it to secure their enterprise data with confidence and ease. Get in touch to find out how. And watch for the final blog in this series.
To dive deeper into this content and read about other CIO best practices, see our white paper “5 Best Practices CIOs Are Using to Modernize Enterprise Data Protection.”
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