10 Facts IT Managers Need to Know About New-Gen Data Protection

by Chris Preimesberger

Employees work anywhere, at any time and on numerous devices. More than two-thirds of survey respondents perform work tasks from home using their mobile devices, while others use smartphones and tablets to work from the car or in airports, hotels or coffee shops. As a result, IT leaders must be prepared to protect data living on the “edge” of the network with proper safeguards in place to mitigate new risks.

Employees know they need to back up; they don’t want to lose their work any more than the organization does. But even the strongest IT mandates forbidding non-sanctioned backup technology will not stop employees from doing whatever it takes to get their work done (and protect it), even if their behavior exposes corporate data to unnecessary risk. Survey results show 41 percent of employees use USB flash drives or CDs/DVDs for backup, and 28 percent use personal external hard drives; both of these common yet inadequate practices expose enterprises to an increased risk of endpoint data loss.

Eighty-six percent of enterprises surveyed have implemented or plan to implement endpoint backup solutions. The majority of respondents cited improving business continuity/disaster recovery as the primary business driver behind the decision. Many times, however, endpoint backup is implemented only for a select few employees or groups of employees (such as executive teams), while other endpoints go unprotected.

Nearly two-thirds of respondents indicated that their organization has experienced data loss at the endpoint due to reasons such as lost or stolen devices, or accidental deletion of files. When enterprises fail to implement a complete endpoint backup protection plan for all employees, data loss remains a significant concern.

Forty-eight percent of respondents said that storing and protecting critical data on endpoints is an important business driver for their implementation of endpoint backup. Other reasons why they want endpoint backup are the desire to maintain control of data (43 percent) and to more easily perform e-discovery and/or legal holds (34 percent) via centralized management of data.

When end-user devices are hacked, stolen, lost or otherwise compromised, enterprises are exposed to data loss, compliance issues, privacy breaches and damaged brand reputation. Yet many enterprises ignore what can be an immense toll on their scarce IT resources when data needs to be restored. Thirty-eight percent of respondents who experienced data loss cited the subsequent drain on IT department resources as the biggest negative impact. Enterprises must adopt ways to back up end-user data without additionally burdening IT staff.

Twenty-seven percent of respondents reported that permanent data loss resulted in a significant loss of time and resources spent trying to recover the information. Automatic endpoint backup features such as versioning, continuous data protection and self-service data restore can dramatically and positively impact the bottom line.

The increasingly mobile workforce brings to light new issues for IT leaders in terms of data compliance, security, version control, manageability and cost. Many organizations attempt to address these challenges by implementing formal policies for how backups should occur (oftentimes manual and ineffective), but employees often ignore the procedures. Because employees ignore or find workarounds to corporate policies, automated endpoint backup is the most reliable way to ensure endpoints are protected.

When employees can’t get what they need to support their work, they’ll search elsewhere for the right app. Nearly half of information worker respondents use unreliable backup methods to secure their files. Automated enterprise endpoint backup solutions need to manage and protect laptop and desktop data silently, continuously in the background, and let employees just keep working—wherever and whenever they choose.

Endpoint data protection is the first step toward “data governance for the edge” that actually works. Once endpoint data is backed up, enterprises can more easily embrace much-needed initiatives around e-discovery, legal holds, disaster recovery, and data migration and encryption.