If you’d like your organization to operate more efficiently and be protected from data loss, you’ll need to eliminate data silos. While data silos often occur as a business grows, they present barriers to continued growth as they lead to poor decision-making, hamper collaboration between employees, and reduce data resilience. As you work to address data silos, you should know what they are, why they create problems for businesses, and how you can ameliorate them with endpoint backup.
What Is a Data Silo?
A data silo refers to a collection of data controlled by a single department or group in an organization, making this data inaccessible to the rest of the organization. Data silos happen when departments create and manage their own data sets, tools, and systems. Siloed data tends to be incompatible with other data sets and is stored in independent systems. This makes it difficult for organizations to share data between departments and prevents informed decisionmaking.
The 4 Main Problems of Data Silos
Data silos lead to multiple problems in an organization, ranging from compliance issues and misinformed decision-making to difficulties with collaboration and reduced data resilience. As you decide whether you should eliminate data silos in your organization, learn more about the four main problems caused by data silos below:
1. Inability to Comply With Data Security Regulations
Data silos increase the risk of non-compliance for organizations which must comply with data security regulations. Typically, these regulations dictate how and where data is stored, how it’s protected, and who can access it. When data is siloed, you must trust that each individual department is following compliance requirements, which increases the risk of non-compliance. Plus, inaccessible data makes it far more difficult for organizations to identify which departments are out of compliance.
2. Inconsistent Data Across Departments
Another common issue with data silos occurs when the same information is stored in multiple independent databases. Over time, one department may update this information while another may not, leading to inconsistent (read“inaccurate!”) data. This lack of consistency causes confusion between departments, reduces data integrity, and prevents employees from having the information they need to perform their work. It also leads to misinformed decision-making, as a department’s leadership team may not have the most up-to-date information or may be leveraging metrics computed differently than in other departments.
3. Difficult Collaboration Between Users
When data is siloed in your organization, it can be difficult for employees from different departments or teams to collaborate with one another. Since the siloed data is not accessible to the entire organization, can be hard to share, and may not be normalized, collaboration is far less likely to occur.
4. Increased Risk of Lost Data and Slower Recovery Times From Data Breaches
Siloed data puts your organization at a far greater risk of lost data, as each department becomes responsible for properly backing up their data. If a department doesn’t prioritize backup or follow organizational policy, a data loss event would cause their data to be permanently lost. Additionally, data silos cause slower recovery times following a data breach, as your IT team is forced to work with individual departments to restore lost data and is without a centralized backup location to restore lost data from.
How Can Endpoint Backup Solve Problems With Data Silos at Businesses?
Endpoint backup refers to the secure storage of a copy of data from an endpoint device, such as a desktop computer, laptop, tablet, or phone. The copied data will either be backed up to a cloud or a local drive (e.g., an external hard drive). Endpoint backup providers offer cloud-based endpoint backup solutions, allowing users to back up their data to a secure external location that is accessible online. By storing endpoint data in a centralized cloud location that’s accessible to authorized users, you can significantly reduce impact and likelihood of data silos.
Review the following benefits of using endpoint backup solutions to eliminate data silos:
- Prevent accidental data silos on endpoints: Employees’ endpoint devices can lead to accidental data silos when the data lives solely on these devices and isn’t shared with other team members. Since endpoint backup solutions should automatically back up data from all your employees’ endpoints, you’ll eliminate the risk of accidental data silos. Instead of living on just the endpoint device, the data will be located in the provider’s cloud, where authorized users can access it.
- Reduced risk of compliance problems: Most data security and regulatory compliance requirements have standards for how data must be backed up. An endpoint backup provider which has designed their product to meet the compliance requirements your organization is subject to will ensure your data is protected in accordance with those requirements.
- Improved data resiliency: Endpoint backup fosters greater data resilience by ensuring data isn’t lost permanently due to a lack of backup standardization across departments (i.e., one department has their team backup data regularly, but another doesn’t enforce their backup policy and loses all of their data during a data loss event). Since the endpoint backup provider should automatically back up data from endpoints, you can standardize backup policies across all departments. When a data loss event or breach occurs, you can also recover fast by restoring all lost or impacted data from the backup provider’s cloud.
Mitigate Data Silos With CrashPlan’s Backup Solutions
If you want to minimize the threat of data silos within your organization, CrashPlan’s endpoint backup solutions can help. Our solutions include automatic backups every 15 minutes to ensure data on employees’ endpoints is safely stored in and accessible from our cloud. CrashPlan also encrypts data while at rest and in transit, has legal hold features to assist with compliance, and provides fast recovery speeds when you need to restore lost data.
Review our Enterprise plan to learn more about how our endpoint backup solutions can help your business. If you’d like to see our endpoint backup solutions in action, please sign up for our free trial.
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