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Before the pandemic, society was already inching towards complete digitalization for online banking or even something as simple as using an app for grocery shopping. At that time, digital transformation and focusing on keeping data protected but also recoverable and accessible was already a challenge.

Large organizations struggled in their digital transformation journeys as many relied on legacy systems, which can be costly to keep up and maintain. Decision-makers have to work within a budget to ensure that business goals, workforce issues, and innovation are addressed.

However, the pandemic has accelerated the need to digitize, forcing organizations to facilitate remote working options at an unimaginably fast pace. To respond, most organizations simply advanced the execution of their pre-planned IT modernization initiatives. While this enabled them to immediately accommodate their users and update legacy systems and enhance functionality, in many cases, it did so at the long-term cost of ignoring growing risks around protecting critical data.

Data protection requires a holistic approach to addressing risks, such as the continued growth of cybersecurity threats and all potential outages, from human errors to system failures and natural disasters. Keeping data secure, backed up, readily available and recoverable is vital to a modern digital business that must operate in an always-on manner.

The challenge is only getting more demanding. According to Veeams Data Protection Trends Report 2022, 84% of APJ organizations have a protection gap between how much data they can afford to lose after an outage and how frequently IT protects their data. While 86% have an availability gap between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back.

Containing business challenges

Business data has become more vulnerable to cyberattacks, forcing organizations to bolster data protection and security to overcome severe disruptions. IT leaders must take the initiative to plan and anticipate what to do when they get attacked rather than waiting for disaster to strike.

Continuing cyberthreats

Ransomware attacks continue to be more frequent than ever. For organizations in the APJ region, only 18% of businesses escaped ransomware attacks in 2022. For those that were attacked, 18% experienced only one, 45% experienced two or three, and 19% experienced as many as four or more in 2022

36% of organizations stated that ransomware (including prevention and remediation) was their most significant hindrance to digital transformation or IT modernization initiatives due to its burden on budgets and workforce.

Human error and education

While cyberthreats can put a massive strain on a businesss productivity and ability to restore data quickly, there is a common, often overlooked security threat unintentional human error. Despite significant education efforts, almost half of global and Asia Pacific businesses reported accidental deletion, overwrite of data, or data corruption as a primary cause of IT outages. Data loss due to human error is an unavoidable fact. Thus all organizations must be on guard and educate their employees on mitigating these events.

Managing hybrid infrastructure complexity

With cloud computing evolving rapidly, the need to protect cloud workloads and maintain compliance has grown. Hybrid IT continues to be the norm, with a relatively even balance between servers within the data center and cloud-hosted servers. Within the data center, there is a good mix of both physical and virtual servers. This year, organizations in the APJ region reported: 29% physical servers within data centers; 25% virtual machines within data centers and 46% cloud-hosted server instances. As a result, 37% of organizations in the APJ region stated that being able to standardize their protection capabilities across their data center, IaaS and SaaS workloads is a crucial driver in their 2023 strategy

Road to Success

Business leaders should consider the following points to ensure that their organizations are set up to succeed:

Prepare your Team

Human error accounts for a significant portion of data breaches. Reducing such errors should not be reactive. Instead, proactive measures should be fully adopted to recover its mission-critical applications in a timely manner. However, to begin recovery at this level, teams within the company must be prepared to take the necessary steps. A report by Forrester Consulting found that in APAC, 53% of businesses agree that their managers do not stress the importance of good security practices and training. Whether its part of a holistic IT strategy or separate, organizations should be educating all staff on safe practices when online. This can significantly reduce the risks of data loss caused by ransomware or other attacks.

Prepare your Plan

To prepare a business for disaster recovery, the ability to anticipate what a zero-day attack looks like and the next steps needed at that moment is vital. Getting services and employees back online as soon as possible is another important aspect that should be prioritized. To achieve this, businesses must have a robust, well-defined plan, enabling them to choose the best course of action to counter the possibility of disasters and minimize any resulting downtime. Businesses must not only have a plan but also put it to the test before a disaster strikes.

Test your Network

Weak, misconfigured, or inadequately maintained networks are an excellent entry point for malicious actors. Investing in network security is a great way to ensure you can mitigate these threats. Penetration testing is a must when figuring out the weaknesses in your network and is often best done by a neutral third party. Sometimes we can be blinded to faults when were used to seeing the same networks and systems.

With technology reaching steep heights, systems and networks are becoming more complex. All businesses have had to contend with resolving the immediate challenges of the pandemic. Still, with cyber-attacks, hardware failures, network issues, and more creating increased complexity, business continuity must be at the top of any organizations list of IT concerns. Today, a BC/DR plan's objective should include speed, accessibility, and remote availability. While the plan isn't something you must update often, it needs to be a solid, well-fleshed-out plan. Because when disaster strikes, all you may have to rely on is your recovery plan and your employees.

Joseph Chan, vice president for Hong Kong, Macau & Taiwan for Hong Kong at Veeam, wrote this article.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends.Image credit: iStockphoto/pishit

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We Have a Pandemic-Driven Data Protection Gap To Close - CDOTrends