Prioritising Data Protection in the UAE

Ransomware and other cyberattacks aimed at mass disruption by compromising data are the greatest risk organisations anywhere in the world face right now. Downtime and outages from natural disasters and human error are still important concerns, but across the complex, heterogeneous, multi-cloud data environments we see in all aspects of business today, malware’s potential to compromise everything in these integrated environments can cause permanent business disruption. With the UAE government’s commitment to bolstering the cybersecurity environment for all businesses in the region, with new initiatives like the Cyber Resilience Strategy for the Digital UAE, businesses in this region are on the forefront of preparedness and awareness of these risks.  Against that backdrop, World Backup Day 2024 is the perfect reminder that data protection is more important than ever, especially in UAE, and that all private and public organisations must continue to update their defenses and ensure compliance, to ensure robust data protection for business continuity and growth.

Here are three key considerations when evaluating your data protection strategy this World Backup Day:

• Uniting data protection with data security and data governance improves cyber resilience. Malware attacks affect the entirety of IT. Multiple teams typically manage the response using disparate tools. Hackers love patchwork defenses because the interaction points can become potential vulnerabilities. An integrated ecosystem of data security, data protection and data governance is the only way to achieve gap-free cyber resilience.

• The cloud is not inherently safer. In the cloud-native era, organisations often incorrectly assume they’re buying an outcome, when they’re really buying infrastructure. There’s a shared responsibility model between cloud service providers (CSPs) and their customers around data protection that far too many fail to understand. CSPs are responsible for the resilience of the cloud, but customers are responsible for the resilience in the cloud. You’re still responsible for protecting your data.

• Today’s complex, heterogeneous, multi-cloud environments require autonomous data management. The proliferation of applications and data from edge to core to cloud is unprecedented and real-time manual protection is no longer possible. Reducing operational complexity through data management that responsibly harnesses AI and hyper-automation to continually self-provision and self-optimise should be your goal.