Cloud and AI expansion lead to data protection challenges

Enterprise IT leaders are grappling with unprecedented challenges in data protection and governance, driven by the rapid adoption of cloud applications and generative AI, according to a new report.

The study from backup and recovery platform Keepit finds that although 70 percent of respondents report that their financial applications are covered by data protection strategies, a significant portion of other key systems and custom applications remain vulnerable.

Only 50 percent of eCommerce and HR management systems are covered, and just 48 percent of CRM and 42 percent of ERP systems.

"Anything related to finance is important, most people will agree. And it's an obvious place to start when you map your critical systems and data. The survey shows that financial systems are by far the most incorporated in data protection strategies, and when you look at verticals, financial institutions are also a little more mature than others," says Kim Larsen, CISO at Keepit.

Only half of the organizations surveyed have incorporated cloud-stored SaaS data into their disaster recovery plans, though another 40 percent plan to address this gap soon. Nearly all organizations prioritize AI data protection, however, with 52 percent already implementing tools for chatbots and AI platforms and 43 percent considering them.

"Good data protection is essentially 'data classification plus good recovery capabilities,' If you understand your data, and can recover uncorrupted versions of it fast, you have a solid foundation to ensure business continuity, compliance and recovery. But this is easier said than done. The complexity of implementing new initiatives, such as governance over data used by large language models (LLMs), and the need to balance conflicting IT demands, pose additional challenges for any industry," adds Larsen.

Among other findings are that compliance is a top concern for 73 percent of survey respondents, with data governance (53 percent) and enterprise backup and recovery (45 percent) also ranking highly.

The full report is available from the Keepit site.

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