The past month has been a busy one for cloud computing. November saw the community gathering at both Microsoft Ignite and KubeCon + CloudNative Con, and as the calendar rolls into December, attendees are gathering this week for the Super Bowl of cloud-computing events: Amazon Web Services’ re:Invent.

While the spotlight at these events falls on cloud-native applications that incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning, another conversation is also taking place. The ever-present question of data protection.

“Data is more distributed than ever,” said Rüya Atac-Barrett (pictured), vice president of marketing, data protection, at Dell EMC. “You have it across multiple clouds, you have data-hungry technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning … and some of these technologies are actually also fueling data growth at the edge.”

All of this means that “unprecedented” volumes of data are being generated, according to Atac-Barrett. “Organizations today are managing seven times the data that they were managing just two years ago,” she said.

Atac-Barrett joined Stu Miniman (@stu), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio in Boston, Massachusetts, for a CUBE Conversation on data protection in the multicloud era and the commonalities that mark companies that have undone successful digital transformation. (* Disclosure below.)

Looking into the eye of the data-protection storm

According to statistics, most companies are still challenged when it comes to data protection and privacy. Citing the “2018 Global Data Protection Index” study commissioned by Dell EMC, Atac-Barrett stated that more than 76% of the respondents had experienced data disruption in the 12 months preceding the survey, with 27% of those reporting actual data losses. The financial impact of these disruptions was “upwards of millions,” Atac-Barrett estimated.

And things aren’t getting any easier. Alongside ever-growing amounts of increasingly dispersed data come the complications of cloud-native application development and increased data regulations and privacy laws.

“Data protection is getting into this area where you would say it’s in the eye of the storm,” Atac-Barrett stated.

Successful digital companies do these three things

Despite the seemingly gloomy statistics, there are companies that have successfully completed digital transformations and established working digital protection strategies. “Companies that are really doing things well or seem to have a handle around their ever-changing data protection needs have three things in common,” Atac-Barrett stated.

The first is the most obvious: They have adopted a data-driven decision making strategy. “First and foremost, they really value data,” Atac-Barrett said. “They look at productivity apps as a significant area of importance; they look at AI machine learning, business intelligence, and analytics as some of the most critical applications.”

The second criteria is to use one, and only one, data protection vendor. Companies that use two or more vendors are 35% more likely to experience a data disruption event, according to the GDPI study. “Multiple vendor solutions really lead to increased complexity,”Atac-Barrett stated. “There’s just more touchpoints, disparate management tools, especially when you’re in a recovery type situation.”

The third commonality between digital companies with successful data protection strategies is that they all have prioritized scale, efficiency, and ease of management.

“While cloud computing gives us a lot of flexibility and agility, it can also bring with it complexity, unknown costs, and increased risk if not managed appropriately,” Atac-Barrett explained. “So, you need data protection solutions … that are easy to scale, easy to deploy, and deliver efficiency and resiliency across this multicloud environment.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE