Nearly two-thirds of the global population will have internet access by next year, according to Cisco’s Annual Internet Report (2018-2023) White Paper. There will be 5.3 billion total internet users (66% of the global population) by 2023, up from 3.9 billion (51% of the global population) in 2018. With this growth in internet usage, the need to secure sensitive data across industries has never been more relevant, especially in light of global events ushering in an increase in attacks on data.

To prepare to defend your data, you need a strategy that can keep up with today’s environment. You want to be an innovator, a trendsetter and, most of all, a security leader. That requires a comprehensive strategy as you move forward. As technology continues to advance, the need for greater security will increase as well.

The cloud journey

The number of data breaches was 17% higher in 2021 than in 2020. The manufacturing and utility sector was affected the most, followed by health care, which saw more than 40 million patient records breached. Ransomware attackers earned about $590 million in the first half of 2021, which surpassed 2020’s total estimated earnings of $416 million.

It’s no secret that it takes a detailed strategy and a trusted partner to protect your data. Are you struggling to keep up? As a starting point, take a look at these five signs that you might need guidance through your data security journey.

Not enough skills

Managing your company’s security that focuses on the most crucial gems of the business is serious work. It requires the skills of those best in the business. With how complex modern security strategies can be, your team may be working within multiple environments across many different vendors. To make matters worse, skilled workers are in short supply.

Lack of direction

The security industry is ever-changing. The tech in our everyday world advances at a breakneck pace, changing how work in security must be done. By 2022, 70% of companies will be using hybrid multicloud platforms as part of a distributed IT infrastructure, according to McKinsey. By 2025, more than 75% of enterprise-generated data will be processed by edge or cloud computing.

Software sourced by companies from cloud-service platforms, open repositories and software-as-a-service providers will rise from 23% today to nearly 50% in 2025. As a result, leaders in security need to understand the direction their companies are headed and ensure proper protections are put into practice.

Too much to handle

Many companies find themselves growing quickly, realizing that their IT infrastructure is becoming too much to handle. They are mired in tool sprawl and looking to scale and provision technologies quickly. In an ideal world, those will be technologies that integrate and work together well. However, they lack the capital to invest in new hardware, software and skilled workers.

Short-sighted strategy

Often, organizations will build their security strategy for the current project rather than the future. This is understandable, considering the speed at which the security landscape changes. But the pull of having an adaptive strategy for the long term is always present, even if seemingly unattainable.

Too expensive

Everything comes down to one thing: budget. Given the recent events across the industry, it should be apparent to leadership in all roles that skimping on the security budget is never a good idea. However, even as executive leadership has come to realize the importance of security investment, security still loses out to projects seen as revenue generating rather than as a cost center.

One solution: A trusted advisor

To better prepare for the modern data landscape, businesses should look to partner with a trusted advisor and move toward modern solutions. There is a trend away from simply using a vendor’s tools. Consulting is often more critical than the tool itself. The benefits of managed service providers take precedence over the services they manage. Why is this?

Well, one assumption we can make, based on the problems outlined earlier, is that working with a skilled advisor or service provider can reduce costs (whether time, money, resources or computing costs), provide long-term direction and help develop a strategy to derive value from existing and new solution investments that may have otherwise sat on the shelf. And that’s a good start for the future.

More from Data Protection

3 Strategies to overcome data security challenges in 2024

3 min read - There are over 17 billion internet-connected devices in the world — and experts expect that number will surge to almost 30 billion by 2030.This rapidly growing digital ecosystem makes it increasingly challenging to protect people’s privacy. Attackers only need to be right once to seize databases of personally identifiable information (PII), including payment card information, addresses, phone numbers and Social Security numbers.In addition to the ever-present cybersecurity threats, data security teams must consider the growing list of data compliance laws…

How data residency impacts security and compliance

3 min read - Every piece of your organization’s data is stored in a physical location. Even data stored in a cloud environment lives in a physical location on the virtual server. However, the data may not be in the location you expect, especially if your company uses multiple cloud providers. The data you are trying to protect may be stored literally across the world from where you sit right now or even in multiple locations at the same time. And if you don’t…

From federation to fabric: IAM’s evolution

15 min read - In the modern day, we’ve come to expect that our various applications can share our identity information with one another. Most of our core systems federate seamlessly and bi-directionally. This means that you can quite easily register and log in to a given service with the user account from another service or even invert that process (technically possible, not always advisable). But what is the next step in our evolution towards greater interoperability between our applications, services and systems?Identity and…

Topic updates

Get email updates and stay ahead of the latest threats to the security landscape, thought leadership and research.
Subscribe today