Intelligent Data Centres Issue 15 | Page 40

EXPERT OPINION The best practice approach to data protection for modern organisations Organisations that do not employ robust data protection schemes put themselves at serious risk of suffering a data breach and causing potentially fatal damage to the business. Florian Malecki, International Product Marketing Senior Director of StorageCraft, explains how organisations can better protect themselves by assessing and testing their recovery plans for ransomware prevention. WWhy is constant data availability so crucial for modern organisations? Data is the lifeblood of any modern organisation. It provides the foundation for understanding where a business is positioned and is essential to analysing customer behaviour, navigating markets and assessing a business’ performance. Many successful business leaders are dependent on the insight provided by data to make informed decisions about the business’ future. If the data is breached, subject to a ransomware attack or unavailable for a given period of time, it can prove catastrophic to a business. Lack of access to critical data can lead to malfunctions across the entire business, from significant revenue loss as a result of system downtime, to remote workers being unable to access shared files. Unquestionably, the constant availability of data is fundamental to the longevity and success of any modern organisation. What is driving the need for businesses to re-assess data protection strategies? Companies are generating oceans of data – and not all of that data is equally important to their function. Organisations that know this and know which pieces of data are more critical to their success than others will be in a position to better manage their storage and better leverage their data. Think about it. As organisations deal with a data deluge, they are trying hard to maximise their storage pools. As a result, they can inadvertently end up putting critical data on less critical servers. Doing so is a problem, because it typically takes longer to access slower, secondary machines and leverage that critical data. It’s this lack of speed and agility that can have a detrimental impact on business. Traditionally, organisations take a serverbased approach to their data backup and recovery deployments. Their priority is 40 Issue 15 www.intelligentdatacentres.com