Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Four Reasons Data Protection Must be a Top Priority in 2023

By Ameesh Divatia, co-founder and CEO, Baffle

A Gartner report from March suggested that security spending would reach $172 billion in 2020, and there are no indications that we will see that number decrease moving forward. At the heart of every security measure is ensuring that a company's data is only seen and used by the appropriat parties. Or to be more bling: Keep it out of the hands of criminals.

As we head into 2023, I believe data protection will move to the forefront as one of the most important business priorities. Here are four reasons why I believe this to be true.

Zero trust accelerates advanced data protection methods.

As security professionals work under the assumption that no one can be blindly trusted with sensitive data, organizations go beyond basic security measures for data protection methods. The move to zero trust proves just how incredibly valuable that data is, and it must be protected at all times, whether in transit, in use or stored in a database.

Organizations seeking to shrink data risk must make the risk of breaches irrelevant. Even with a zero trust posture, a breach will happen eventually. Businesses that understand this reality will employ proactive protection methods at the field or record level, which renders data unusable to hackers in case of a breach. 

Compliance is now a C-suite concern.

When GDPR, the most extensive data privacy regulation to date, went into effect in 2018, the rest of the world quickly followed suit. Companies could no longer make data privacy a secondary concern. In 2023, five states-California, Colorado, Connecticut, Utah and Virginia-will begin enforcing new data privacy laws. In fact, the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) replaces the California Consumer Protection Act (CCPA) with more stringent requirements.

We have seen numerous multi-million dollar GDPR fines in the last couple of years and a recent CCPA non-compliance penalty that exceeded $1 million. And maintaining compliance is no easy task when an organization is subject to multiple data privacy laws with varying definitions of sensitive data and rules for how to protect it. Companies must be proactive and invest in team members or consultants who can help them sort through the complexity and maintain compliance.

A possible recession will drastically increase data's value.

Unfortunately, many warning signs are pointing to an impending recession. As such, companies will rely on data more than ever to uncover valuable insights that can create efficiencies, discover emerging market trends and enablee prudent sales targeting decisions. For some, that data could be the difference between staying afloat during challenging times and making difficult decisions. Given the critical nature of data insight during potential recessions, organizations must employ methods that allow continuous analysis while protecting data at all times.

As mentioned, we are starting to see substantial non-compliance fines. When every dollar is scrutinized during a recession, unexpected expenses like fines make a trying situation ever more challenging.

Enterprises will more aggressively transition from traditional data stores to data pipelines.

With incalculable amounts of generated and consumed data by almost every business, decision-makers at the highest level understand how critical data is for nearly every decision. The proof point is the ever-increasing investments in data processing infrastructure and data engineering personnel. The conduit for data insight is the data pipeline, which companies rely on with greater frequency than ever.

However, data pipelines can be compromised-either intentionally or unintentionally-leading to non-compliance, revenue loss and reputational damage. Companies will make more significant investments in 2023 to employ data de-identification methods and privacy-enhanced computation techniques that allow data processing without exposing it.

Data has become a company's most valuable non-human asset, and companies realize more than ever that implementing best-in-class protection methods makes business sense. As we move into 2023, companies prioritizing data protection will make the most of their data while avoiding very challenging setbacks.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Ameesh Divatia is co-founder and CEO of Baffle, Inc., a cloud data protection company. He has a proven track record of turning technologies that are difficult to build into successful businesses, selling three companies for more than $425 million combined in the service provider and enterprise data center infrastructure markets.