Executive | May 9, 2023 5 min to read

Top 8 Enterprise Data Protection Threats

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As the market for data protection grows, consumers have grown accustomed to fast, easy, and intuitive data pipelines. On the other hand, enterprises face a volume of complexities and dependencies that most consumers never encounter and are often discounted from their point of view.

In a world where data is located across many clouds and on-premises data centers, organizations must ensure that data is always available, scalable, and protected. But achieving this isn’t so simple. A successful enterprise data management strategy should:

· Support complex, hybrid, and multi-cloud environments and enterprise workloads

· Manage across multiple locations and geographies

· Scale to thousands of protected devices

Enterprise data management solutions supply, handle, and monitor security across all data repositories and entities within an enterprise. The solutions safeguard against ransomware, control compliance, and governance regulations, and they remove uncertainty from application deployment.

With the key tenets of a successful solution in mind, let’s take a look at the pitfalls most enterprises face when tackling these challenges.

Key Challenges in Enterprise Data Management

An enterprise is responsible for managing and protecting an organization’s large- and small-scale information. This includes corporate data, business strategies, payroll records, customer and employee information, team messages, and Outlook email data. Not only is this information confidential, but it’s critical to keep the business running.

It’s time to get ahead of the game by learning where others have struggled.

The top eight enterprise data protection challenges today include:

Data growth and data management
Cybersecurity threats and data breaches
Compliance with regulations and standards
Cloud data protection
Insider threats
Lack of visibility and control
Access control management
Data security and disaster recovery

1. Data Growth and Data Management

Organizational data is growing at a rapid rate, but many companies still rely on outdated infrastructure and legacy systems that can’t handle ever-ballooning data demands. According to the 2024 Data Protection Trends report, many corporate IT environments are still running legacy backup solutions designed for the physical data center era. This hinders an enterprise’s ability to focus on cloud-based SaaS and IaaS, which puts your data at risk of data breach and can lead to unoptimized large-scale data management.

2. Cybersecurity Threats and Data Breaches

Enterprises are huge targets for malicious actors. In the first half of 2024, ransomware payments in the United States exceeded $449 million. Hackers know how you use business information, and they know keeping it safe is critical to your enterprise’s future. Their objective is to break into a company’s digital infrastructure to extract sensitive information and prevent normal operations, giving the enterprise no other option but to comply with their ransomware demands.

3. Compliance Regulations and Standards

As enterprises grow, many become international corporations. Not only do multinational enterprises need to be aware of the rules and regulations of their home countries, but they also have to know the laws of every country they’re based in. Failure to do so can lead to massive losses. For example, in 2024, the Irish Data Protection Commission fined Meta €91 million ($96 million USD). Watch the 2023 Enterprise Data Protection Summit webinar, which includes a session on compliance and data protection, for tips on navigating such challenges.

4. Cloud Data Protection

Due to the lower cost, flexibility, and ubiquity of the cloud, hybrid and multi-cloud data applications have grown in popularity. This growth has put companies accustomed to legacy data protection solutions at risk. According to the 2024 Data Protection Trends report, cyber threats are considered the most common and concerning challenge among those pursuing digital transformation initiatives.

5. Insider Threats

The larger the enterprise, the more likely bad actors are working from within. Regardless of whether these actors are malicious, the misuse of access to critical systems or sensitive information can severely damage an enterprise. Whether they’re a disgruntled former employee or a careless social media poster, without the proper enterprise data management services in place, an enterprise’s mission, resources, facilities, information, equipment, networks, and systems are subject to exploitation.

6. Lack of Visibility and Control

As an enterprise may manage thousands of nation-spanning devices and personnel, data management is susceptible to becoming a “black box” of unknown inner workings. This is especially true when employing hybrid and multi-cloud environments for workloads. When an enterprise can’t explain how its organization works at all levels — from core system functions and cloud-hosted workloads to employee access — it decreases efficiency and neglects security. Without visibility, the enterprise runs the risk of overlooking vulnerabilities and being unable to regain control when a data breach occurs.

7. Access Control Management

Organizations need to introduce systems that allow them to control who has access to critical systems and how much access they have. Without effective identity and access management systems in place, hackers can hijack credentials and take control of systems for nefarious purposes. This could allow them to steal information, deploy ransomware, and deny access from authorized personnel.

8. Data Security and Disaster Recovery

Backups are increasingly targeted by extortionists, who destroy or encrypt data repositories to further pressure victims to meet ransomware demands. Organizations must be prepared. According to statistics gathered by Veeam, 75% of companies experience cyberattacks, and in 96% of these attacks, hackers target backup repositories. This isn’t the only risk faced by corporations. Natural disasters, fire, and theft can destroy critical infrastructure, and unless the organization has an effective disaster recovery solution in place, it could be forced out of business.

Impact of Enterprise Data Protection Challenges

Going forward with an unoptimized data protection strategy increases the risk of financial loss, damage to reputation, decreased productivity and business continuity, and severe legal consequences.

Financial Loss

For enterprises, a comprehensive data protection strategy is necessary to avoid unwanted monetary losses that result from paying a ransom due to the loss of unprotected data, covering fines for breaking data protection regulations, or downtime. Failure to properly implement an enterprise data security strategy doesn’t lead to a slap on the wrist — it leads to devastating losses.

Damage to Reputation

When the news breaks that an enterprise was fined millions of dollars for the misuse of personal data, paid out a hefty ransom to hackers, or lost weeks of business due to downtime, that enterprise gains a reputation for unreliability. Customers and partners become hesitant to work with or buy from that enterprise, which may lead to millions of dollars lost, stagnation of growth, and a lasting impact on that company’s reputation.

Legal Consequences

As mentioned earlier, the ignorance or avoidance of a country’s data compliance regulations has dire consequences for enterprises. Google was required to pay a fine of $10.47 million for failing to comply with Spanish regulations. Having a comprehensive data protection strategy to protect against loss means little if a nation audits an enterprise and finds an illegal or unethical use of data.

Decreased Productivity and Business Continuity

Business continuity and productivity is an essential component of any enterprise. In 2023, the mean downtime in healthcare organizations due to ransomware attacks was 18.7 days. Worldwide, the average cost of a data breach in 2024 is estimated to be $4.88 million. You never expect ransomware to hit, but it’s not a matter of “if” — it’s a matter of “when.”

How to Conquer Enterprise Data Security Issues with Veeam

This blog discusses the critical challenges and consequences enterprises face when tackling large-scale data protection. But what can enterprises do to ensure success? The tried-and-true best practices enterprises should follow are more than worthy of implementation, but certain tasks need dedicated software and the reliable support of industry experts to help pave the way to success.

These best practices include securing networks using robust security information and event management solutions (SIEM) that protect against compromised accounts, insider threats, phishing, and brute force attacks. SIEM also gives the organization the ability to detect and respond quickly to threats. Coupled with SIEM is the need for effective enterprise data protection and recovery using data encryption, access control, and authentication solutions. Organizations should consider data backup and recovery solutions that ensure the organization has air-gapped and immutable backups on hand to enable fast disaster recovery.

Veeam’s more than 450,000 worldwide customers have many success stories and examples of how enterprises saved themselves and/or recovered from disaster by adopting Veeam’s data security solutions to protect enterprise data. These stories detail how large organizations around the world used Veeam Backup solutions for enterprises to recover from ransomware attacks and optimize their data protection strategies.