Intelligent CISO Issue 05 | Page 77

decrypting myths Three ways to ensure your data’s safety With data breaches rising in frequency, enterprises need to take steps to prevent their most important asset falling into the wrong hands. Jeroen Schlosser, Managing Director, Equinix MENA, offers some advice on how to best achieve this level of security. www.intelligentciso.com | Issue 05 T here is always the threat that losing your comp any’s data will bring your business to a close. Not only is the cyberattack landscape increasing in frequency, scale and complexity but the cost of trying to recover from an attack is growing astronomically as well. A recent IBM Security and Ponemon Institute global study showed the average total cost of a data breach, which includes what an organisation spends on the discovery of and the immediate response to one breach, is US$3.62 million. And then there is the high cost of gaining back customers’ trust, which is impossible to quantify and, in some cases, to recover from. Here are some of the ways you can protect your data and ensure that you’ve covered all your data protection bases. 1. Is where you store and back up your data physically separate and secure? While it’s not considered best practice, some businesses may still be keeping their primary data and data backup sites near each other/in the same vicinity. Under these circumstances, natural disasters such as hurricanes, earthquakes and tornadoes could easily take out both locations within minutes. Many companies are seeing this as a crack in their data protection armour. To remedy this, they are turning to distributed colocation data centre providers that enable them to replicate 77