Last year, Gartner predicted that by 2025, 45% of organizations worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software, a figure that will have trebled since 2021 (1). In fall 2022, they also forecast that global spending on information security and risk management products and services will grow by 11.3% in 2023, reaching more than USD 188.3 billion (2). In light of increasing cyber-attacks, heavier investment in areas such as information security software, cloud security, data privacy, and infrastructure protection is vital to protect the operational data in live systems against cyber-attacks and ensure regulatory compliance. However, besides operational data, an organization’s historical data requires special attention too, and failure to protect it can have serious repercussions. This blog explains why and also looks at the real consequences of a data breach.
Cyber-attacks and Data Security Breaches
Cyber-attacks are becoming ever-more sophisticated and come in many different forms: malware, phishing, denial-of-service, man-in-the-middle, SQL injection, and password attacks – the list goes on. During a cyber-attack, hackers use various tactics to identify vulnerabilities in the software’s security and gain unauthorized access to data. When a company suffers a data breach, the consequences are far-reaching and can have a devastating effect on its brand reputation. Besides suffering long-term reputational damage, other likely repercussions range from loss of trust among customers and loss of intellectual property to insurance premium hikes, financial penalties from regulators, and increased legal and PR costs to manage the fallout out of the data breach. All these factors can impact the organization’s revenue and competitiveness, making them a less attractive player in the market – a situation that some companies struggle to recover from.
Don’t Neglect Your Historical Data
While a great deal of attention is paid to protecting operational data in live systems against attacks and breaches, it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that your legacy data requires protection too. Modern software versions from reputable providers are generally kept up to date and free of vulnerabilities through regular patches and updates to fix bugs, plug security gaps, and continually enhance the software’s security features. But what about the decades of historical information stored on older, outdated systems? Mitigating the security risks on legacy systems should form a central part of a company’s information and data security strategy. Legacy systems with software that are no longer supported or patched are an attractive target for hackers who can exploit security gaps and weaknesses in the software design. In parallel, compliance with data protection regulations is crucial and historical information must be stored for legal retention periods, which can be anything up to 40+ years, depending on the industry. Experts in managing and migrating data, DMI offers an application retirement solution and central information management platform JiVS to solve these security and data retention issues.
Application Retirement with DMI – the Key to Increased Data Security
Fending off cyber-attacks is a daily battle with legacy systems. When implementing JiVS, all the legacy information is first extracted from the outdated systems, condensed, and stored on a central and highly secure platform that is regularly updated. The latest security technologies are used to keep the historical information safely locked away, yet accessible when needed. The next step is to retire the legacy applications. By shutting them down, the company mitigates the security risks, saves up to 80% in operational costs, and improves its sustainability by reducing its data storage requirements and using less energy to run the single energy-efficient platform JiVS, where its historical data now lives.
To find out how JiVS can solve your legacy system dilemma and enhance data security as well as sustainability through application retirement, get in touch with our data experts.
Author: Tom Belleman, Project Manager and Senior Consultant, Data Migration International