We can no longer say, “The storm is coming.” A downpour of recent changes has rocked the landscape of the internet. Change is already here, and it’s having an impact on the market that your organization can’t afford to ignore.
In just a brief amount of time, we’re almost certainly going to see a massive shift related to new rules for data use and protection. Business leaders and decision makers who ignore what’s happening in the market are vulnerable to being swept away.
So, what changes will drive the market over the next two to five years? What is driving the market now? Let’s list out the important factors.
Market pressure to adopt online security will come from these major factors:
• Net neutrality.
• Data protection rules and regulations put in place in both the U.S. and the European Union.
• A general sense that companies will want to avoid increasing liability for stored data.
• A continued increase in the mobility of employees and the need for data protection and access management.
• A desire of consumers to share private networks to limit the exposure of private data.
How will these factors influence the market? Let’s start by examining net neutrality and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation. Due to attempts to deregulate the industry with the repeal of net neutrality, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has unwittingly put businesses at the mercy of large corporations that can throttle data and selectively squeeze organizations.
At the same time, legislators in the European Union and California (subscription required) are attempting to put into place consumer data protections that will shift responsibility and liability to business.
Both of these developments will lead to the same outcome. Business owners will find that the shift heightens costs and places additional IT management, maintenance and infrastructure burdens on their resources. Those costs might be passed along to consumers, but there are other problems that must be addressed.
Those additional pressures on business will include an increased cost around the transmission of data, which will lead many organizations to rethink how they manage, transmit and store their data. Instead of using the public cloud, such as Dropbox or Google files, for business applications, they’ll want to avoid managing heavy demand by moving data to storage on internal resources.
This will be accomplished by moving data on the public cloud to a private cloud system, possibly with an internal network. But the reason for the move won’t be purely about the transmission of data. There will be major security issues around accessing data online through a public cloud, which will lead many to adopt a private cloud service, VPNs and private networks to access the cloud.
What’s more, any private cloud that isn’t properly secured could leave organizations vulnerable to data protection liability. This will require increased security for employees accessing data through their wireless mobile devices, even when they’re in the office.
There will also be liability issues around data storage created by the GDPR. Hosting services that provide access to software through the internet, such as Quickbooks, may be forced to shift responsibility for data storage back to organizations that are using the platforms online (aka their clients).
That shift will be motivated by attempts from hosting and software service providers to avoid managing individual requests for data collection info. They’ll want to shift those burdens back to business owners, and that will drive change.
I fear that the burden will be too great for some small businesses and put too much pressure on organizations across the board. For that reason, it’s high time for everyone to review their data use, storage and transmission policies.
These market pressures are inescapable. It’s essential that everyone accelerates their timeline for adopting cybersecurity measures. You need to protect your data before you fall victim to market forces, or worse — the malicious attack of a hacker.
These changes will occur within the next two to five years, but the time to prepare and act is now.
SOURCE : FORBES
