The General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union, which emphasized increasing protection of its citizen’s personal & confidential data, turned enforceable in May 2018. Since then, organizations across the globe have been working hard and consistently on GDPR readiness. According to the 2019 Data Privacy Benchmark Study of Cisco, nearly 60% of organizations have reported complying to most or all requirements, approximately 30% of organizations are pegged to do so by 2020-end, and the rest of them would need more time to comply with these requirements.
India ranks 6th globally in GDPR readiness owing to its rapidly evolving data privacy ecosystem, built by the collaborative approach of the private and government organizations. The scope is huge for Indian organizations to invest in technology to meet the requirements of customer privacy faster. Organizations in the country are presenting greater preparedness in meeting all or most GDPR requirements.
A lower number of data breach incidents, fewer records in security compromisations, and shorter system downtimes have been cited by GDPR-ready organizations. Also, financial losses from a data breach are reduced significantly and more organizations are witnessing multiple-border benefits in their data privacy investments. This includes greater innovation and agility resulting from appropriate data controls, improved operational efficiency, and a competitive edge.
Expanding Data Protection in the Public Cloud
The cloud journey has been a common sight in the IT industry in recent years, pointing at major changes for organizations in terms of both opportunities and risks. Several SaaS applications lack SLAs and inherent protection features that are otherwise accustomed to on-prem. Thus, providing data protection for SaaS applications has become a key priority for CSPs.
Another key area that is being emphasized is greater offerings for cloud-native workloads, especially virtual workloads in the public cloud. Several SLAs involve minimal protection for such workloads and protecting them in their native formats has become key to helping organizations pave a smooth pathway for the cloud transition.
For organizations eyeing enhancement of their disaster recovery (DR) strategies, the cloud offers excellent capabilities. The rise in awareness among organizations about the role of their DR strategies in different levels of applications has been growing, along with the importance of managing different recovery SLAs for every application. CSPs continue to innovate their solutions as cloud offerings mature, enabling organizations to cope up with the latest in cloud adoption.
Benefits Brought by Data Protection in the Public Cloud
Data protection in the public cloud entails an opportunity for eliminating the efforts required to run the backup infrastructure. Choosing the public cloud for data protection brings significant benefits that include
Added Value: Data protection in the public cloud can leverage native services, provided with access to several cloud services. This will either improve service delivery or deliver added value in terms of disaster recovery, ransomware detection, and analytics.
Inferred Geo-capability: Public cloud deployment has gained a pervasive prevalence and irrespective of business locations there are cloud endpoints at their service. CSPs are networking their data centers to deliver a mesh that encompasses the world, making backup data and services available universally.
Demand-based Model: Cloud services are delivered on-demand, meaning they can be put to a halt if not required. The pay-as-you-go nature further complements their flexibility, eliminating the requirements as confronted with on-prem infrastructure.
Infinite Scalability: The public cloud can be scaled infinitely to all purposes and intents. Zero efforts are involved on the side of customers and continuous availability of services is ensured.
The emphasis on data protection and privacy increased manifold this year, as data became the new currency alongside the market shifts. Organizations are now realizing true business benefits from their data protection investments. The belief of organizations inclines toward driving business success and protecting customers by maximizing the data value and mitigating risks.
