The modern, data-driven business

For businesses that manage their own data and application needs end-to-end in-house, there’s usually a 50/50 split between logical or cyber threats and natural or physical threats.

This model places the entire risk from threats to data, applications, and infrastructure from both virtual and physical sources entirely on the business. It’s a big responsibility to shoulder that’s not entirely fool-proof. In fact, this modern, data-driven business model faces three key challenges:

Lack of skillsets. Data science is a niche skill set. Without the right data being collected, stored, and analysed, organisations risk not reaping the full benefits created by data-driven business models.that ensure the right data is being collected, stored and analysed.

High investments. Too much focus focus on data may translate into high levels of investments into databases, software and hardware. While investments are essential, they should be aligned with the organisation’s end goals. Over-investment in big data and analytics tools can impact the return on investments and adversely affect the profitability and business plans.

Blind spots. Data-driven organisations should continue to be aware of their market and expect competition to come from unexpected places. An over-dependence on data may lead organisations to base their decisions on only the available information, ignoring market trends or up-and-coming innovations that may not yet be represented in their data.

Outsource the risk

By looking outside your organisation to data centre or cloud providers, the risk of a physical threat to this critical infrastructure is significantly diminished, as these environments are designed to endure these types of threats. A good provider will use multiple facilities in various locations to create additional redundancy, greatly reducing the threat of attack — the likelihood of adverse conditions affecting more than one location is remote.

This type of arrangement also offers the best solution for maintaining the operation of critical business applications. Should your physical office or primary site fail for some reason, added redundancy means staff can still access and utilise critical data and applications. In many cases, switching from the primary site to a secondary one can occur almost immediately, leading to little, if any, business downtime.

Leaving the protection of physical threats to a company like Vocus means your staff have more time and resources available for other projects. If you'd like to explore your security options, we're here to help.