M+E Connections

During the April 11 webinar “Data Breaches and Storage Costs: The Silent Business Killers,” Wasabi Technologies and data management company Aparavi sought to answer everybody’s burning data questions, covering the skyrocketing costs of cloud storage, the destructive consequences of on-premises storage, and the alarming growth in data breach rates.

Addressed were why hundreds of consequential data breaches occur each year, how companies can fight this ever-growing issue, why 45% of U.S. companies have experienced a data breach, how to combat high storage costs while keeping data tight and locked, why data management is killing businesses and how businesses can fight back to end the issue once and for all.

Host Garth Semple, platform specialist at Aparavi, started the webinar off by telling viewers: “The general topics we’ll be covering today are data breaches and storage costs. I don’t have to probably state that [these are] two of the biggest concerns of almost every company out there.”

Then, he said, “we will go ahead and address how Aparavi and Wasabi can help increase efficiencies.”

David Boland, VP of cloud strategy at Wasabi Technologies, pointed out his company has a “worldwide footprint of data centers where people can store their important data offsite.”

Earlier in 2023, “we introduced a new service called Cloud Sync Manager” that Boland said is a web-based platform allowing customers to do two things: “One, you can make a copy of your data in one region and move it to another region. So you can have cross region replications. Say you have some important critical data that you need to keep for compliance purposes for a specific amount of time. And the compliance states you have to have two copies of it stored someplace safe. Well, Cloud Sync Manager will take that data, make a copy of it on the East Coast and store a second copy on the West Coast. That’s our bucket replication feature.”

The second thing it does is “migrate data out of clouds or any S3 compliant storage into Wasabi,” he explained, adding: “If you have a multi-cloud environment, which a lot of people do these days, and you would like to have either another copy of your data that’s in AWS, Azure, Google in a different cloud or you just would like to migrate that data out of those clouds into Wasabi, you can use Cloud Sync Manager to make copies of your data” and do that.

Data Breaches Persist

Meanwhile, “there are preventative security measures that you can take to protect yourself from data breaches,” according to Semple. But, according to recent data, 85% of breaches “involve the human element, which allows malicious characters to work around security structures and exfiltrate that data,” he said.

He explained: “When we’re talking about data breaches, what is targeted … [are] weak credentials. I’m sure we’ve all been guilty of reusing the same passwords, although auto-generated passwords are trying to help fight against that.”

But then there is an issue with stolen credentials also, he noted. “More phishing software allows for cyber criminals to pose as internal employees…. We’re all aware that they’re just becoming more intelligent with the attacks. They’re becoming more malicious and they’re becoming harder to detect…. Cyber criminals are able to bypass regular authentication steps that would normally protect your infrastructure from spyware.”

Those, he said, “are the attacks that are most difficult to detect,” he said, adding they “can go undetected for long periods of time, really increasing that vulnerability and risk to you and your assets.”

An additional challenge is the widespread use of third-party vendors and software on various devices, he added.

“We do everything we can to protect our network but we all know that there are still vulnerabilities out there,” he went on to say. “And that’s why you guys are on this webinar here today: to help understand how Aparavi and Wasabi together can help build you a better data strategy and security strategy.”