How are You Protecting and Securing Data: 2023 Research

Whether a company is gradually evolving and updating its IT services, or as part of any IT-led digital transformation, data protection must be at the forefront of any strategy.  

While the cloud may sound like a complex and technical landscape, gaining visibility into data, where it moves and what state it’s stored in is key to developing a strong security posture. By role, C-Suite and Directors overwhelmingly believe their organization is secure or very secure, while only 65% of Managers believe their organization is secure with 13% in the very secure mindset. 

What are your biggest data protection pain points? 

Enabling an array of applications can be a headache for business, especially those focused on bottom line growth or keeping the lights on. A skills gap, which can result in insufficient business knowledge to deliver a solution, was a key pain point for 54% of IT leaders. 

If there’s any comfort in the numbers, organizations large and small struggle with this issue. While cloud partners or ISVs can deliver general or optimized security, they may not be fine-tuned to meet business needs. 

Keeping up with the latest regulations came in as the second most common data protection pain point, as stated by 49% of respondents. Most businesses should have an IT security office whose role includes understanding changes in regional, local and industry-specific regulations, and ensuring the business complies with them. 

The third most common pain point is managing and deleting large amounts of data (47%), an issue which can be best managed by having a thorough grasp of the first two. Storing data securely and in compliance with regulations can resolve many of the issues businesses have as their data footprint grows. 

Do you backup your data enough? 

It’s a strong positive to see 63% of businesses back up their data daily, with 24% of respondents doing so weekly.  

There’s a strong curve by organization size with around 81% of large enterprise respondents backing up daily, tailing off to just 55% of the smallest firms. This approach will add business recovery efforts if there’s ever a major event, and can mitigate ransomware attacks, if the company protects those backups and stores them remotely to prevent the ransomware perpetrators from accessing them. 

As IT pros look for ways to strengthen the business posture, data encryption, becomes a critical way to do this. However, if only 80% of organizations are encrypting key financial data, then 20% remain vulnerable. 

Strong backup and encryption procedures in line with regulations and going beyond the basics will help ensure businesses remain secure, or can recover faster and with minimal damage should there be an issue. 

Access the Enterprise Security Research Report 

For more detailed insights into the current state of enterprise security, including the current threat landscape, the challenges around remote/hybrid working and security priorities for the next year, download the report today.