What is data protection?

A storage solution should provide data protection, but also enable you to recover data that was deleted or modified. For example, multiple levels of redundancy aid in protecting your data from things like service outages, hardware problems, and natural disasters. Versioning preserves previous states of your data when an overwrite operation creates a new version. Configure a lock—for example, read only or cannot delete—on your storage accounts to help protect them from accidental or malicious deletion.

A firewall helps to ensure that only authorized users have access to your organization’s data. It works by monitoring and filtering network traffic according to your security rules and helps block threats like viruses and ransomware attempts. Firewall settings typically include options to create inbound and outbound rules, specify connection security rules, view monitoring logs, and receive notifications when the firewall blocked something.

Data discovery is the process of finding what data sets exist in your organization within data centers, laptops and desktop computers, various mobile devices, and on cloud platforms. The next step is to categorize your data (for example, mark it as restricted, private, or public) and verify that it meets regulatory compliance.

Authentication and authorization controls verify user credentials and confirm that access privileges are assigned and applied correctly. Role-based access control is one example of providing access to only the people who need it to do their jobs. It can be used in conjunction with identity and access management to help control what employees can and can’t access in order to keep your organization’s resources—like apps, files, and data—more secure.

Backups fall into the category of data management. They can be as frequent as you need them to be (for example, full backups every night and incremental backups throughout the day) and they enable you to restore lost or corrupted data quickly to minimize downtime. A typical backup strategy includes saving several copies of your data and storing a full copy set on a separate server and another in an off-site location. Your backup strategy will align with your disaster recovery plan.

Encryption helps maintain the security, confidentiality, and integrity of your data. It is used on data that is at rest or in motion to prevent unauthorized users from viewing file content even if they gain access to its location. Plaintext is transformed into unreadable cipher-text (in other words, data is converted into code) that requires a decryption key to read or process it.

Disaster recovery is an element of information security (InfoSec) that focuses on how organizations use backups to restore data and return to normal operating conditions following a disaster (for example, a natural disaster, large-scale equipment failure, or a cyberattack). It’s a proactive approach that helps your organization reduce the impact of unpredictable events and respond more quickly to planned or unplanned interruptions.

A snapshot is a view of your file system at a particular point in time; it preserves that view and tracks any changes made after that point. This data protection solution references storage arrays that use a collection of drives instead of servers. Arrays typically create a catalog that points to the location of data. A snapshot copies an array and sets the data to read only. New entries are created in the catalog while old catalogs are preserved. Snapshots also include system configurations to recover servers.

Erasure is deleting stored data that your organization no longer needs. This process is also known as data wiping or data deletion and is often a regulatory requirement. In relation to GDPR, individuals have the right to have their personal data erased upon request. This right to erasure is also called “the right to be forgotten.”