What makes data the lifeblood of modern fashion companies?
It supplies information that can help brands and manufacturers stay increasingly relevant, efficient and competitive in their markets. From major fashion houses, with their culture of mystery, to small family businesses with unequalled industry savoir-faire, they have all become aware of the need to protect this vital data.
Despite the many risks – viruses, malware, theft, corruption or accidental loss–, many organizations today still believe that their data is more secure on their own servers than in an online storage cloud system. This school of thought comes from a place of caution, however this is not being cautious. Storing ones data on local servers is an open invitation for anyone to take an uninvited look around.
How do fashion companies manage their core business activity while protecting their data?
Even if a company sets up a team dedicated to data storage and security, this will never be its core business activity. Their data will always be more secure in the hands of specialized industry pure-players. The cloud is not as abstract as its name suggests.
Just in terms of the physical premises, a fashion company may deem their server room safe, with its access filmed and limited to authorized personnel. However, it will never be as protected as the data centers of the hosting giants, genuine ultra-secure fortresses. The data remains stored in a physical structure that is protected by a myriad of both passwords and complicated physical locations.
Today's public cloud providers use highly sophisticated identification, protection, detection, response and recovery technologies to protect the data that they have been entrusted. For total confidentiality, the data entrusted to online storage systems is always encrypted – in their storage location and during transport over the network
Some companies are wary of the possible access by certain governments to the data hosted on their territory – this is the case in the United States, with the USA Patriot Act. There is a response: hosting your data in your own country, or a more data-protective territory, such as the European Union, where the GDPR was enacted on May 25, 2018.
Your typical, well-established, medium-sized fashion company that, by nature, does not specialize in cyber security may be opening themselves to preventable vulnerabilities by hosting their data on their own servers. Why take that risk when they can be protected, secured and able to focus all their energy on dressing their loyal clientele.
