Looking at the state of the storage industry, one can easily see the unabated growth of data and its resulting impact on consumers’ ability to retain that data and protect it effectively. According to a latest research, 58% of survey participants envision the growth of data between 11% and 30 % annually. As an example based on these results, a growth rate of an annual 20% for someone managing 20TB of data over five years would result in a whopping 4 TB of data in one year, reaching to 50 TB by year five.
The retention and protection of this data, hence, becomes a very serious issue. Data protection and backup storage solutions are struggling to meet such expectations.
Data retention comes from the ever increasing needs to hold on to data in order to either meet various data management regulations, personal data archiving needs, internal business governance, or pure simply, to be able to have data backups as a recovery option in case of any incidents.
Data protection, data storage, and data recovery continue to dominate the agenda for many people. As customer challenges grow within the data protection arena, so do the solutions and their technological capabilities.
With most form of protecting data relying on making copies and archiving, most common solutions include removing data from its primary storage area and making multiple copies and distributing them to various points. But time and again, this way of archiving and protecting data is redundant and not very safe. In fact, it is not safe at all.
The future of data protection is a holistic approach to various data security needs lying around in computer storages and in protecting data and the many options that needs to be available to safeguard that data.
With technological advances in cryptography and experts continuously striving to provide better data protection solutions, the progress needs to move in the next quadrant of data protection and backup provisions.
A strong AES encrypted data is extremely difficult to cipher than regular basic encryptions or protection methods. Recovering an encrypted key is no five-minute job, and even though the latest AES hack is four times faster than other methods, the number of steps required to crack AES-128 is an 8 followed by 37 zeroes.
In simpler words, testing a billion keys per second on trillion machines, it would take more than two billion years to recover an AES-128 key!
The future of data security needs to be about rethinking our currently held paradigms. Broad spectrum solutions for the future need to border on renewed ideas, for example, about how two-factor authentication is not unstoppable to malicious hackers hell-bent on hacking into banking systems and making way with other people’s money.
With all of its advances, computer security may be far worse in the future than at present times. With the increasingly accurate anti-virus programs, improved patch management, and solid improvements in OS security across all platforms, one would think the first statement may be an exaggeration.
It has been observed that no patch could ever come close to even fixing almost 50 percent of reported vulnerabilities over the years, which ads on to the fact that the attack to defense ratio is dwindling faster. Many experts attribute these trends to the complex nature of systems and the data security measures required to protect them. As the complexity of a system grows, it becomes less secure. With the Internet recording maximum reach, and continuously striving to push for acceptance across hard-to-reach regions, things have taken a wild turn towards the many unknowns currently unimaginable, as the Internet happens to be the most complex machine ever built. And it is these complexities of such systems that not only make data security options harder but also makes it easier for hackers to penetrate into them.
Everything in the computer world keeps getting better – except security. But the truth of the matter is that data security and information security technologies do get better. What does not seem to happen is the equilibrium between the complexities of the system and security.
The case is similar for all sectors of the society when it comes to data security. Home computer users, business corporations, government agencies, and small and medium businesses all face the challenges of data security, examples of which is allowing certain users to have access to data without allowing unauthorized access or without compromising existing list of authorized users.
The first step to stopping the many disjointed tactics and achieving compliance and risk is by implementing a holistic approach to data security. A few questions towards achieving that should concentrate on the costs associated with existing data protection infrastructures or the lack of such mechanisms, the total impact on productivity, the post-breach scenario analysis, available data protection products and backup solutions in the market, and how easily available are these solutions and products.
These are fundamental questions in order to define a baseline strategy towards achieving a comprehensive data protection mechanism in place that also sustains the system in the event of any future data protection needs.