In 2022, the world is projected to create 74 zettabytes (ZB) of data, growing to an estimated 175 ZB by 2025. In case you’re wondering, 1 zettabyte equals 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 [1021] bytes. That’s a lot of zeros and tons of data! It also means enormous risks for the organizations that create and manage that data.
As the rate of big data increases each year, industry and federal regulators around the world keep pace by creating, updating, and enforcing data protection and privacy laws. The strict regulations put pressure on organizations to comply with these rules or face exorbitant fines.
To help organizations ensure compliance, dedicated data protection software solutions play a pivotal role in their security stack. In this post, you gain insights into why your organization needs a data protection solution, the laws around it, and our list of the top 10 best data protection software.
What is data protection software
Data protection software supports regulatory compliance by protecting sensitive data from theft, loss, or misuse. Solutions typically cover three core areas of data protection:
- Backup and recovery capabilities, including replication and archiving, to facilitate data restoration.
- Data security capabilities, such as encryption, authentication, and access control.
- Data privacy features, including policy enforcement and data governance, to ensure users access data for authorized purposes in compliance with regulations.
While data security and data protection and their solutions might seem the same, they’re not. Where data security applies to infrastructure security, data protection is broader in scope and more comprehensive in achieving compliance. Another way to look at it is that data protection provides data security, but data security alone does not suffice for data protection.
Key business impacts of data protection laws
Data protection laws play a prominent role in today’s information security landscape. In an increasingly digital world in which customers electronically share their information with businesses, data protection and data privacy laws emerged to strengthen individual control over how businesses use personal data.
A few long-standing industry regulations include:
- Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
- Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA)
- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)
Government regulations include the following examples among many others:
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU
- Data Protection Act in the UK
- California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) in the US
Non-compliance with these regulations carries a range of negative business impacts, including:
- Severe penalties and fines
- Reputational damage due to a loss of trust
- Legal action and its associated costs
The sheer volume of regulations can be difficult to keep up with and meet compliance requirements for businesses of all sizes. However, the struggle is worth it, given the negative consequences of non-compliance. In a recent report, 66 percent of security professionals said compliance mandates alone were a driving factor for security spending.
10 best data protection software solutions for 2022
Take a look at our recommendations for the ten best data protection solutions. Because each one has a unique value, we’ve listed them in alphabetical order.
1. Acronis
Acronis Cyber Protect provides backup and restoration for individual files or entire systems. Users select their files that need continuous protection so that each change to those files is also backed up. This solution is best suited for small-to-medium businesses (SMBs). Although Cyber Protect also comes with data security features, it has limited reporting capabilities and occasionally slow performance for full backups.
Price: From $59 per year for 1 workstation
2. CybeReady
CybeReady takes a unique approach to data protection as it focuses on people rather than data. It’s an often-repeated fact that human error causes the majority of data breaches. This human error typically stems from poor cybersecurity awareness. Businesses that make the effort to increase security awareness achieve significant improvements in data protection.
CybeReady has a fully managed training program that transforms the security culture for organizations of all sizes. The solution uses machine learning for engaging, relevant, and continuous security awareness that empowers employees to better protect data.
Pricing: Contact CybeReady
3. Barracuda
Barracuda Backup helps protect against data loss by backing up data to dedicated on-site hardware and cloud-based virtual machines (VMs). Its key features include data replication and robust encryption. The pay-per-use pricing structure makes Barracuda Backup usable for businesses of all sizes. However, users of this solution report lack-luster support and performance issues when backing up large files.
Price: Pay-per-use plans
4. Cohesity
Cohesity DataProtect focuses on data backup and recovery with options to combine on-premises hardware and cloud infrastructure or back up only to the cloud. This solution provides instant recovery times for VMs, files, and application objects and is ideal for enterprises. Drawbacks include basic reports that might not be useful for compliance reporting, as well as compatibility issues with several legacy systems still used by enterprises today.
Price: $245,475 per year to back up 200 VMs and 120 TB of data
5. Eperi
Eperi provides data protection features, including encryptions and tokenization, specifically for cloud data. Organizations can centrally enforce compliance policies and regulatory requirements in their cloud applications. This solution is best suited for medium-to-large organizations. Because Eperi is ideal for protecting cloud data, the downside is it doesn’t cover on-premises data.
Price: Upon request
6. Hitachi Vantara Data Protection Suite
The Hitachi Vantara Data Protection Suite provides backup, recovery, and data management for enterprise users. The suite leverages geo-redundancy and object storage. A couple of disadvantages of this solution are its complexity and difficult-to-navigate user interface.
Price: Upon request
7. SpectralOps
Spectral scans code to find misconfigurations and hardcoded secrets that are exposed in the code. Spectral takes SAST security solutions to the next level by scanning across the entire software development lifecycle for misconfigured secrets and keys. Secrets are like passwords for code execution. They specify access to specific locations. When misconfigured or hardcoded they can become exposed and “stolen” by attackers to access data they should not have access to otherwise.
Pricing: Upon request
8. Storagepipe
Storagepipe Multiplatform Backup backs up data across Windows, Mac, Linux, and UNIX operating systems—on-premises, to the cloud, or offsite. Their cloud backup solutions come with encryption and secure connections. StoragePipe is suitable for businesses of any size that run multiple operating systems.
Price: Upon request
9. Thales
Thales Data Protection on Demand is a cloud-based solution that provides data security via a pay-per-use pricing model. The central tenets of this service include encryption, network separation, integrity, policy-based rules, and confidentiality. Although Thales brands the solution as providing data protection, it’s more geared toward data security and doesn’t comprehensively address data protection.
Price: Pay-per-use model
10. Polar security
One of the biggest challenges with data protection is understanding where all your data, and your customers’ sensitive data is being stored and managed in real-time. Since data management has become increasingly agile and all about performance and distribution so must data security. Polar security was designed to monitor dynamic data flows and alert in real-time of any non-compliance. It is truly a solution for modern data management.
Price: upon request
Protect your data before it’s too late
