Data protection and security are crucial to the success of any modern organization. As of 2020, the average cost of an enterprise data breach is $3.86 million. Today’s enterprises, whatever the size, face several data protection challenges, including data breaches, cyber-attacks, and insider threats.

But there is often a disconnect between what companies know they need to do to protect their data and what they actually do. Frequently, data protection is an afterthought either due to a lack of financial resources or lack of support by decision-makers.

As more businesses embrace digital transformation, increasing the amount of data stored, the greater the challenge to keep it safe and the more crucial enterprise data protection becomes.

Enterprise data refers to data shared by all the users in an organization. It is a critical business asset that includes sensitive and proprietary business data. Some characteristics of enterprise data include:

• Data that must be secured using access controls
• Data that must remain consistent as it is shared throughout the organization
• Data that must follow specific regulatory standards

Enterprise data protection ensures the safety of an organization’s data by delivering, managing, and monitoring security for all critical data. It includes the use of a combination of tools, policies, techniques, and frameworks to protect enterprise data, whether it is in use, in transit, or at rest. Data security procedures and standards can vary based on how critical the data is to a business and how it is used.

Data protection is delivered using common information security technologies, i.e. antivirus applications, firewalls, data security policies, and standards for governing and managing the data protection process.

Having the right controls and technologies in place to protect data is critical to the viability of any business and its ability to innovate and grow. Business data is valuable to hackers on the black market, but the largest concern today is extortion by third parties encrypting data to make access impossible until a ransom is paid to decrypt the data again. An enterprise data protection solution helps companies avoid compliance breaches, protect enterprise intellectual property, mitigate cyber threats, minimize downtime, and increase business resilience.

Reliable storage technology is an important part of an effective enterprise data protection strategy. WORM (Write-Once, Read-Many) or Retention Management options are a proven data storage technology used by large enterprises and government agencies for archiving data. It prevents data from being edited or deleted either permanently or for a pre-set period of time after it has been written but allows it to be read an unlimited number of times.

WORM devices store data in a non-rewritable format to prevent users from accidentally erasing or altering sensitive information to ensure the integrity of the original information. This makes WORM devices suitable for storing data that the organization wants to protect from intentional or accidental deletion and unauthorized changes.

Retention Management uses file properties, such as creation date, to define how long data should be protected. If the storage is only accessible through the application, that application can manage when a file appears to be WORM and when it should be switched back to being a standard read/write file.

QStar’s Retention technology archives data either to WORM media or through Retention Management settings to ensure that recorded data cannot be overwritten, modified, or manipulated. It creates a WORM-compliant archive storage environment that complies with the strictest national and international regulations for archiving sensitive data and log files, document management, and all electronic record storage.

QStar’s Retention technology can be used in conjunction with content and document management software and systems, and to store financial and other sensitive data.

For additional levels of protection, QStar can also encrypt data. Although encryption does not prevent deletion of data, it does prevent modification by someone accessing the data without using the QStar application.

With QStar’s Retention Management technology, you are guaranteed a secure, legally admissible, long-term retention data archiving solution. LTO (Linear Tape Open) offers both rewritable and WORM media options and QStar can be configured to create a set for WORM media and a separate set for rewritable media, allowing organizations to manage different types of data. LTFS (Linear Tape File System) cannot be used on LTO WORM media, but using QStar Retention Management and encryption options, standard rewritable media can be protected, allowing you to store and protect vast quantities of data at a low cost. The same can be applied to other “random access” forms of storage – such as RAID or Private or Public Cloud.