Target. Amazon. Equifax. The City of Baltimore. The City of Atlanta.
What do they have in common? They have all experienced a data breach or outage that negatively affected their reputations and their customers or constituents.
No entity is invincible, even with the best security software. But, making sure you have an airtight business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) plan is a simple step to help give you peace of mind that your data will be protected against natural and manmade disasters. The benefits of implementing a solid BCDR plan far outweigh the risks of not having one, so consider the following reasons you should have a data protection solution that works for your hyperconverged infrastructure.
Protect your reputation and your revenue
Consider this: your company is hit with a data breach, exposing private customer data. The news hits the wire and if you lack a BCDR plan, chaos ensues. Customers sound off on social media. Your stock price tumbles. Your IT department scrambles to correct the vulnerability. Your PR team throws together a statement to appease the situation.
When disaster strikes a business, whether natural or manmade, the impacts of downtime can have a ripple effect throughout the whole organization. We surveyed IT decision makers,1 and 93% of them told us they could tolerate minimal, if any, data loss from critical business applications, with 50% stating they have less than one hour to recover before it starts impacting revenue.1
But the negative effects of downtime go beyond financial. Downtime can cause a blow to your reputation, a loss in productivity, and a hit to your stock value and shareholder confidence. Implementing a BCDR plan with actionable steps on how to properly handle disasters before, during and after the event can give you peace of mind that your data, reputation, and revenue will be safe.
Safeguard against ransomware and hackers
Today’s hackers and ransomware viruses are more sophisticated than ever. Data is a highly sought-after commodity, but if your IT infrastructure is not properly protected and you don’t have a strong BCDR plan in place, you could be forced to choose between rewarding the cyber extortionist with bitcoins—or weathering the financial burden that naturally results from data loss and downtime.
For local governments recently hit by ransomware attacks, the negative effects go far beyond financial impact to the taxpayers. In Atlanta, the 2018 SamSam virus attacked all city government agencies, “knocking out court scheduling, online bill payments, and airport WiFI.”2 Legal files were lost, police dashcam footage was destroyed, and correspondence by elected officials was deleted. A year later, the city continues the recovery process and is charting its own digital transformation journey with an emphasis on cybersecurity to ensure an attack like this doesn’t happen again.
Ensure regulatory compliance
GDPR. HIPAA. PIPEDA. NPPs.3 The global alphabet soup of privacy regulations can make anyone’s stomach turn. But fall into non-compliance, and the governing agencies know exactly how to hit you where it hurts – your corporate pocketbook.
In the EU, the GDPR went into effect just over a year ago, and the penalties are steep: the maximum penalty for a breach is 20 million euros or 4% of a company's global turnover - whichever is higher.4 And tech giants are already feeling the consequences of breaking the EU’s data regulations.
A complaint for "lack of transparency, inadequate information and lack of valid consent regarding ads personalisation" was filed against Google in France, resulting in a fine of 50 million euros.5 Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Spotify have also been targets of GDPR complaints regarding providing customers a copy of their personal data that can be easily understood and read in a machine-readable format. According to the BBC, “In theory, Apple could be fined £7bn if the regulatory authority rules that it has broken the law.”6
Learn how Arcserve protects Nutanix environments
Nutanix delivers solutions that enable multi-cloud architectures, built on powerful hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology to integrate compute, virtualization, storage, networking and security. And with the stakes so high in today’s digital economy, protecting these virtualized environments is critical. Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP) offers full protection of onsite, virtual, cloud and SaaS-based workloads – including Nutanix AHV.
Learn how you can easily implement a complete DR and backup strategy for your Nutanix AHV-based IT infrastructure with Arcserve in our webinar "Agile Backup and Disaster Recover for On-Premises and Cloud Applications."
Resources:
- Arcserve and MayHill Strategies survey, September 2018.
- https://statescoop.com/one-year-after-atlantas-ransomware-attack-the-city-says-its-transforming-its-technology/
- https://pdpecho.com/privacy-laws-around-the-world/
- https://www.itgovernance.co.uk/dpa-and-gdpr-penalties
- https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46944696
- https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46944694
