Assets take many forms. In the past, examples of assets included accounts receivable or equipment. In the last decade, companies have considered their physical and digital infrastructure as assets as well. But what’s hosted in the physical and digital infrastructure has proven to be a competitive advantage for every company: data.
In today’s information age, data is the currency for success. Company data provides insights into key business opportunities, the ability to discern key behavioral trends of their target customers or the capability to identify usage and spending patterns to design better products or services. Furthermore, the World Economic Forum acknowledges this fact by declaring data as a new economic asset class.
In such a state of affairs, companies face two major challenges – first, gathering the right data and second, protecting it.
Gathering the right data depends on the business strategy in place. Protecting the gathered data presents a whole different set of challenges.
Various legislations mandate companies to take measures to protect data from lurking cybercriminals and other threats. However, being compliant does not mean being secure by any stretch of the imagination. Companies need to go beyond basic compliance-based security and take a holistic view of data protection, data management, and disaster recovery systems. They need a comprehensive plan that talks about how to use data as a company’s competitive advantage and how to protect such competitive assets.
Asset protection can manifest in several ways:
- Companies need to have a data protection infrastructure in place, but they also need to ensure that it is configured correctly. It shouldn’t interfere with day-to-day operations and it should be protected from the right threats.
- Effective data protection does not only depend on the software and hardware you have in place. It also depends on strategies that make best use of the software and hardware. Proactive user permission systems, or segmenting critical data such as health care patient records away from the main network, exemplify physical protection methods.
- A data governance model incorporates both the obvious and latent threats that exist in digitized data storage. Use readily available measures, such as penetration testing tools (many which are free), to identify security risks.
- Apart from protective measures, companies also require a strong and seamless backup in place to protect their intellectual assets from loss and to reduce downtime if disaster strikes. The backup plan needs to be comprehensive, to protect all the important data and be seamless to integrate itself automatically into the core data operations so that it does not become an overbearing chore.
- Finally, if something disastrous does happen, the primary reason you need asset protection in place comes down to the same thing – the ability to recover your data. With the right infrastructure in place, recovery should be both easy and fast.
STORServer offers flexible and fully integrated data backup solutions and data protection plans that allow you to protect this crucial competitive asset and leverage it optimally. We take out the headache of planning and figuring out how to incorporate all of these suggestions into your physical and digital infrastructure. Contact us today for a consultation.
