During the pandemic we have seen how important security is as organisations embrace remote and hybrid working environments. While employees are often cited as potential entry points for hackers, data protection is something that businesses should be paying attention to.
According to the Dell Technologies Global Data Protection Index, locally there is not much confidence in terms of the data protection solutions that many organisations employ, especially when it comes to handling future challenges.
To that end, the survey saw 72 percent of South Africans note that they are concerned in this regard. Said report gathered the insight from over 1 000 IT decision makers in 15 different countries, including our own.
Preparation is key
Dell Technologies adds that their concerns are well founded, with 20 percent of South African respondents reporting data loss in the last year and 44 percent experiencing unplanned system downtime.
As aforementioned, working from home presents a challenge, with 68 percent of local respondents agreeing that they have increased exposure to data loss from cyber threats as a result of not being in the office.
Whether businesses can better prepare for these eventualities remains to be seen, but confidence among employees is rather low in terms of that metric.
On this front the report shows that in SA, 46 percent of respondents lack confidence that all their business-critical data can be recovered in the event of a destructive cyberattack or data loss. That said, the local percentage is still better than the global average of 67 percent.
Looking forward, it appears as if emerging technologies are also raising from red flags. Here, 12 percent of local respondents cite cloud-native applications, Kubernetes containers, artificial intelligence and machine learning as posing a risk to data protection.
More specifically the the lack of data protection solutions for newer technologies was a top-three challenge for organisations.
Take action
Naturally Dell Technologies points to many of its own solutions to address the above concerns.
“Dell Technologies helps organisations address the ever-evolving IT landscape with solutions that protect modern workloads with a singular approach. Through constant innovation, agile engineering and tight integration with VMware and other industry leaders, Dell delivers technologies and services to help businesses protect data residing at the edge, core data centres and across multi-cloud environments,” the firm highlights in a press release sent to Hypertext.
“As the digital economy grows so too do data volumes and, in turn, the cyber threat surface area. At Dell Technologies we provide our customers with software and managed services and a single point of call, reducing risk and providing peace of mind that their business-critical data is protected from edge to core to cloud. Our customers can feel confident that through our single-vendor approach, all facets of their data landscape will be taken into account and protected,” adds Doug Woolley, MD of Dell Technologies South Africa.
Whether you opt for a Dell Technologies solution or not, it is clear that organisations need to take action in terms of data protection as their employees definitely believe that not enough is being done.
You can read the full Global Data Protection Index for 2021 here.
[Image – CC 0 Pixabay]
