Three Trends Impacting Tech Firms and Their Data Protection Implications

Going into 2020, growth within the technology sector was predicted to remain strong, with companies riding the wave of digital transformation in other industries. As the COVID-19 pandemic took hold and accelerated the adoption of new technologies, these companies continued to fare well, providing capabilities for organizations to be agile and resilient, enabling remote work, for example. 

High-tech companies are often the poster children for digital transformation, as they naturally live by the vision they sell. As these organizations look to develop new digital capabilities in an effort to build resilience and retool for the post-pandemic world, keeping up with fast-moving technology trends is as important as ever. But just as critical when moving this fast is making sure data remains protected.

Here are a few trends technology companies should pay attention to and the role data protection plays in each.

The need to keep up with the likes of Amazon, Google and other tech-forward competitors is putting emphasis on automation and greater speed, agility and flexibility. This squeeze has gotten even tighter as COVID-19 has accelerated the digitization of more and more internal processes and customer experiences. 

To achieve this, companies need to stay on the leading edge of technology and development best practices. The growing prevalence of low-code and no-code tools in various cloud platforms (also known as “declarative development”) makes it possible for less experienced developers or even non-technical folks to create or customize apps using simple point-and-click, drag-and-drop configuration rather than dealing with complex code. In fact, Gartner projects that low-code will account for more than 65% of application development activity by 2024. 

With that power however, comes great responsibility. Workflows and applications created by non-IT professionals greatly increase the chance of inadvertent data loss or corruption impacting mission-critical SaaS systems. And no CIO wants an avoidable data problem to become the obstacle that slows down sales, customer support, or digital innovation. 

The ability to roll back any potential mis-steps is important to take the pressure off of developers, as well as eliminate costly downtime from data loss or corruption. 

Enterprises today generate huge amounts of data in their daily operations. But that’s no accomplishment on its own. The challenge for companies-especially tech ones-is being able to glean insights from that data to gain a competitive advantage. 

Building integrations is one way tech companies can get more from their data. For example, on Salesforce, marketing teams can use Salesforce Pardot and Marketing Cloud to manage marketing activities and centralize their customer relationship management.

What these companies often overlook however, is that the more applications you add to your tech stack, the more risk of disruption to processes and transactions that rely on data. Integration errors make up 8% of all data loss and corruption, and can occur when companies integrate internal systems and applications. The default configurations or changes made to configurations can result in unexpected behavior that could cause a data loss or corruption to occur. 

For tech companies using integrations to enrich their data, it’s critical to have a backup and recovery solution in place before, during and after making these changes. This way, you can establish a baseline before any changes are made, and roll back any inadvertent changes made during the integration process.

Although many companies were hesitant in embracing remote work at first, the pandemic has showcased how technology can allow employees to operate at similar levels of productivity with ease – despite being outside of their workplace. 

Now that it seems like remote-or at least hybrid- work is here to stay, tech companies will have the opportunity to further optimize remote work capabilities and take full advantage of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI). For instance, companies can use machine learning programs to monitor employee performance, analyze resumes to help with recruiting, and more. 

Despite these opportunities, as organizations allow a significant part of the workforce to remain remote, cybersecurity will become an even greater concern in 2021. In Cisco’s recent Future of Secure Remote Work Report, 85% of all respondents reported that cybersecurity is extremely important or more important than before the pandemic. 

In many cases, remote employees have the ability to access corporate servers, customer data, email, databases, and the cloud all from their laptop or mobile device. However, logging in to any of these networks without the company’s private internet connection increases the risk for that employee experiencing a data security incident and for information to be compromised.

Just as remote employees can mitigate these risks by using security measures like VPN and two-factor authentication, employers have the responsibility to invest in enterprise-wide data protection and security capabilities.