By Ripu Bajwa, Director Sales & General Manager, Data Protection Solutions, Dell Technologies
In today’s world, digital transformation is happening at a lightning speed, and it is evident from the sheer growth of the digital processes across industries in India. The IT industry has reached USD 14 billion mark earlier this year, and the Indian Digital Transformation Market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 74.7% till 2024.
This growth can be accredited to multiple factors – from changing customer landscape to proliferation of customer channels to organizations investing in new emerging technologies. Today, organizations are looking at cloud native applications, containers, AI, and machine learning, which are generating large amounts of data. In addition to these, we are also witnessing a lot of new data sets being transformed. Traditional enterprise workloads are either being retired or replaced with these new-age data sets.
Earlier what used to be just that one more thing that the IT team had to take care of, with all the fast-paced digital changes, today data security has now become an intrinsic business issue and seen as a critical element in the overall organization structure. A recent global Dell Technologies study – the Dell Technologies Data Protection Index reported that 53% of businesses in India are far from their digital transformation goals. According to the report, Indian businesses are unsure of their capabilities to meet security goals in the future and lack of confidence to manage mission-critical data. 74% of the Indian businesses reported increased incidents of data loss from cyberattacks in the past year and around 68% believed that their existing data protection solutions will be unable to meet the challenges of the future. With the threats of ransomware, malware, leaks in data, and rising sophistication in the cyberattacks, Indian businesses cannot consider data protection as an afterthought. As of June 2022, India’s data breach rate was 740% higher than the first quarter (Q1) this year, rising from 5 to 42 breached accounts per minute.
As we progress further into the digital era, it will be of utmost importance to secure data wherever it resides. With a data-first mindset, Indian organisations will ace at continuity of business while making significant progress in their digital transformation journey. The five cybersecurity framework functions used to organize these categories are:
- Identify and Deploy: which basically means you deploy an organizational understanding to manage cybersecurity risks to systems, people, data, assets and all the other surrounding equipment.
- Protect: develop and implement appropriate safeguards to ensure delivery of critical services for any organization. The protect function supposes the ability to limit and contain the impact of a potential cybersecurity event.
- Detect: organizations need to develop and implement appropriate activities that help them identify any breach or any security event. Now this is very important if the discovery doesn’t happen in a timely fashion.
- Respond: organizations need to have a posture on how they react and take the necessary actions in case they detect a cyber treat.
- Recover: the last but the most critical point, where organizations have a plan which helps them meet their resilience and help them restore all their business-critical applications and services that are impaired due to a cybersecurity event.
Organisations who want to realise their digital transformation goals and secure themselves against cyber threats will need to act now. Even the smallest of efforts towards developing a robust and secure infrastructure can help businesses protect their future. Simple measures like choosing secure IT infrastructure support, conducting a password audit and investing in Zero Trust solutions, will go a long way in protecting crucial data for businesses in India.