Businesses of all sizes have turned to, standardized on, and leaned into cloud-delivered technology. From private to public, the cloud offers the unique capability to reimagine IT infrastructure and how we develop and consume applications. But as with any modernization process, it doesn’t come without challenges.

Protecting data in and across clouds can be difficult.

Native tooling offers baseline utilities, but cloud platforms aren’t purpose-built for data protection. While leading IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and SaaS (Software as a Service) providers deliver robust, durable, and highly performant platforms to consume cloud services, they aren’t steeped in comprehensive backup and recovery of data.

With emerging cyber threats on the rise, today’s businesses must understand their role in protecting data stored in the cloud, and the gaps that overreliance on native tooling present to their business (and data).

The Laws of Protecting Cloud Data

To start, it’s important to understand your business’ role in data protection. Whether at the edge, in the data center, or (drumroll…) across any of your new favorite SaaS or IaaS platforms, the Shared Responsibility Model dictates that protecting data is always the customer’s responsibility. After all, it is YOUR data.

This common principle has led many businesses to consider backup utilities residing within native platforms. What modern businesses commonly find is that they need more. They need dedicated security tools that minimize the risk of an attack on data. They need rapid response capabilities that drive business continuity and mitigate loss. They need standardized management, compliance, and protection that layers across disparate cloud and on-prem environments.

So how do dedicated data protection solutions deliver? Here are three irreplaceable elements of third-party protection for your cloud data:

1. Isolation and Immutability
   Data protection best practices revolve around preserving and maintaining pristine data copies. This is particularly important when facing data loss at the hands of advanced cyber threats, rogue administrators, or accidental user deletion. At its core, safeguarding data in the cloud demands the need for source-side data isolation.
   
   With native tooling, production and tertiary copies live within the same security boundary – meaning that impacted production environments could neutralize backup utilizes or data copies themselves. How would I effectively recover if my compromised environment also contained my backups? Air-gapping data outside source environments separates backup data into a separate security domain. This means events occurring in and around cloud platforms cannot also leap into backup copies. Additionally, immutable-by-design architectures ensure data remains unmodified, unaltered, and can’t be tampered with. This further reduces the risk of impact, applying a zero-trust approach to ensuring clean data is available and recoverable at a moment’s notice.
   
   
2. Protection, Recoverability, and Compliance
   Cloud service providers have a lot on their plates. From availability and uptime, to access and performance, best-in-class offerings deliver reliable environments to run your applications and your business. But they can’t be everything to everyone. When facing a data loss event, businesses must have confidence and proven solutions to get data back quickly – without compromise.
   
   Dedicated data protection solutions offer elevated performance in the realm of backup, retention, and recoverability. This is the ability to safeguard structured or unstructured cloud data at scale, for comprehensive and deep coverage of unique data types living in diverse workloads and applications. Built-in, long-term retention offers extended protection of active and deleted data beyond recycling bin and tombstone limits. Granular and flexible recovery, powers version-level recoveries and mass environment-wide restores. And dedicated controls help maintain data compliance with local, regulatory, and internal regulations.
   
   This level of precision, speed, and control enables businesses to uniquely meet backup and recovery SLAs while adhering to the most rigorous confidentiality, integrity, and availability standards for government agencies and businesses, alike.
   
   
3. Cloud-Agnostic Coverage
   Businesses operate in a hybrid and multi-cloud world. Application adoption, mergers and acquisitions, and line of business needs have introduced myriad cloud applications and infrastructures – all with varying levels of native backup utilities. This disparity across environments introduces risk as data in the cloud is siloed, requires case-by-case oversight, and consumes IT overhead to safeguard.
   
   Protecting and managing cloud data estates requires a uniform platform that reaches across disjointed cloud and SaaS environments and eliminates gaps. This simplifies data protection workflows and reduces blind spots by consolidating backups, compliance, and recoveries under one hood. It enables centralized governance and can also accelerate cloud adoption, knowing enterprises have a single experience to protect data uniformly across existing and future investments.

Is your data living in the cloud? For more information on safeguarding cloud and SaaS workloads, visit the following page.