*by Gustavo Leite
CEOs have a lot to worry about. Even after bringing in the best and brightest team of professionals, the weight of success or failure of entire ventures rests on your shoulders. So it's no wonder that so many CEOs implicitly trust their CIOs and CSOs to manage and protect their organizations' second most valuable asset after their employees – their data.
However, unless data protection becomes a priority for the entire C-level, especially the CEO, threats to the integrity of this asset will continue to place companies, their data, and consumers, whose personally identifiable information is typically compromised, at significant risk.
With that in mind, there are three key things every CEO should know about managing and protecting data:
- you must care
As a 21st century executive, you are undoubtedly passionate about getting the most business intelligence value out of your company's data. But – and this may seem obvious to some, and I've talked to many CEOs to learn that not everyone has this complete understanding yet – you also need to be very focused on how your data is managed and protected.
Because? Two words: reputation and revenue.
Poor data management and protection can affect your bottom line in a variety of ways, from downtime and remediation costs for unpreparing for a ransomware attack, to data compliance and governance-related fines, to overall inefficiency in your operations.
All of these consequences are pretty bad and will have a direct negative impact on your bottom line, but they don't come close to the lasting effect that a damaged reputation can have on your revenue. In fact, one search commissioned by Veritas Technologies found that nearly half of consumers would reconsider doing business with a company that was negatively affected by a ransomware attack.
- The impact of the three Vs
The three Vs of data are:
- Volume, which refers to the total amount of data your company is creating.
- Velocity, which refers to the rate at which your company is creating this data.
- Variety, which refers to the numeric formats in which the data arrives.
All three Vs continue to increase exponentially, making your IT team's ability to manage and protect your data increasingly complicated.
For example, in 2010, former CEO and executive chairman of Google and Alphabet, Eric Schmidt, said the famous phrase: “There were five exabytes of information created between the dawn of civilization until 2003, but that amount of information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing.“. Well, the projections Current data indicate that the total amount of data we will create in 2022 is 97 zettabytes (volume). Using the 2010 Schmidt number as a baseline means that in 2022 we will be creating the same five exabytes of data almost every 27 minutes (speed). And that's not all, this data is coming from an unprecedented number of sources and formats (variety) – the days of nice, tidy databases full of structured data are long gone. Some estimates put the amount of unstructured data being created in 90% of all corporate data. Because? Because unstructured data can be almost anything — video, audio, documents, emails, social media content, sensor logs. And the list grows longer and longer.
Ultimately, the massive increases in each of the three Vs have generally resulted in inconsistent data management and protection policies in companies around the world; and, most likely reader, that includes your company. In essence, traditional approaches to managing and protecting data are no longer enough.
You need to be prepared to empower your CIO, CSO and IT department to meet today's challenges with the help of features like autonomous data management – AI-driven technology that can self-provision, optimize and self-provision fully autonomously. management services for the vast amounts of data in the multi-cloud environments that companies are migrating to. Otherwise, see #1 above.
- The cloud can be friend and foe
Whether you realize it or not, your organization is “in the cloud”.
How can you be so sure about that? Well, in all sectors, three fifths of all corporate data will be stored in the cloud by 2022. Second, corporate cloud computing spending across all key areas of IT infrastructure is on track to overcome spending on local solutions by 2025.
The cloud makes a lot of sense for several reasons:
- Flexibility, including scalability and mobility.
- Efficiency, including affordability and speed to market.
- Cost, including pay-as-you-go models and elimination of hardware expenses.
But it can be unstable, especially in the increasingly multi-cloud world we find ourselves in. Multicloud refers to how corporate data is being dispersed not just across on-premises data centers and the cloud, but across many service providers.
This evolution is happening for good reason, but it could also start to erode the return on investment of the cloud benefits listed above, potentially increasing:
- Complexity: Moving to the cloud doesn't mean the organization is buying an outcome, it's simply buying infrastructure — the ultimate responsibility for your cloud-based data — and the role of managing and protecting it — still rests with your IT department .
- Cost: Due to the consumption model of cloud computing, poor data management in multi-cloud environments can quickly lead to escalating expenses that eliminate any cost benefit of cloud computing.
- Vulnerability: Complexity and vulnerability go hand in hand—increasing complexity equates to a greater potential attack surface for ransomware and other threats to data integrity.
If you're not already engaged with your CIO and CSO on data management and protection, use these three points as a basis for starting a conversation. You'll be glad you did, and so will they.
Gustavo Leite is Vice President, LATAM at Veritas Technologies
Notice: The opinion presented in this article is the responsibility of its author and not of ABES - Brazilian Association of Software Companies
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