With the explosion of data and the acceleration to the cloud, IT teams are struggling to navigate the growing challenges of protecting sensitive data in multi-cloud environments. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 85% of organizations will embrace a cloud-first principle. With data continuing to multiply, data breaches occurring regularly, and privacy regulation laws surfacing worldwide, companies must find an efficient way to retain control of their data security in this new era.

Adopting technologies that allow you to protect data at the source and quickly move protected data from one environment to another helps reduce multi-cloud complexity. Native data protection offered by cloud service providers (CSP), cloud data warehouses (CDW) and SaaS applications doesn't allow you to move your data freely between clouds and locks you into a specific environment. Data portability is crucial for multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments, and native protection, as good as it is within its own environment, won't enable you to unleash your data's potential at scale.  

Let's visualize this concept by returning to the golden age of piracy.

As a child, I heard multiple stories of pirates and how they navigated the seas to find the most beautiful treasures. In our childhood tales, pirates were some of the most ruthless thieves and the protagonists of many beloved stories like Peter Pan. Pirates have often been used in cybersecurity to describe cyber attackers.

However, let me explain how using this analogy can help us understand why using data-centric protection that enables secure data portability is critical to privacy compliance in a sea of clouds. Below, I will explore two possible scenarios for how you can protect your treasures, high-value data, from pirates and which method will pass the test. 

Scenario A: Protect your treasures on the island.

In this scenario, you are using native protection on the island to hide your treasures from the pirates. As they roam the seas, pirates can't tell that your island is full of treasures, and you are confident that you have outsmarted your thieves.

Oh no! The volcano erupts and is about to flood the entire island with hot lava. You can only save your treasures by removing the protection, loading them onto a ship and moving them to a neighbouring island.

As you are sailing, pirate ships surround you. Unfortunately, the pirates were able to steal your treasures, and they are now reaping the benefits of your gold. 

Scenario B: Protect your treasure at the "gold" level.

Now let's imagine you protect your treasures at the source, meaning that your treasure appears to anyone else as rocks, something worthless to pirates.

A volcano erupts again! You must now load your treasures onto a ship and move them to a neighboring island. In this scenario, you are loading ''rocks'' on a ship.

As you take off, you are still worried about the pirates, but you know that if they decide to attack you, your gold will be useless to them because your treasures are rocks to anyone who cannot reverse the protection.

As you navigate the seas, pirates aren’t paying attention to you because of your pile of rocks. You were successfully able to move the treasures to a neighboring island and the best part; there is no need to reprotect them.  

This analogy, as simple as it may be, highlights the importance of data mobility in multi-cloud and hybrid IT environments. Voltage SecureData enables you to run analytics at scale with privacy by design. Our leading format-preserving data protection techniques are persistent and platform-agnostic allowing you to protect data over its entire lifecycle. Our cloud analytics knowledge hub explores this topic in detail, be sure to check it out. 

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