What is a Data Champion, and Why Should Every Business Have One?
Picture this: you’ve been backing up your data for years. You feel confident that your business is safe from potential threats.
Then, one day, a ransomware attack infests your company and disrupts your entire operations.
You attempt to restore your backup, only to discover it’s infected too (yikes). Months of malware had been lurking in the shadows, waiting to strike.
Terrifying? Absolutely.
This is where a Data Champion comes in—someone responsible for continuously testing, securing, and ensuring the integrity of your data protection strategy. They are the unsung hero of the modern business world, standing between your critical information and the growing threat of ransomware.
So, who’s watching your data?
What is a Data Champion?
A Data Champion goes beyond simply ensuring your files are backed up. They’re the key person responsible for protecting your data and maintaining data integrity, analytics, and compliance with different regulatory standards like GDPR and PCI-DSS.
Data governance and master data management are about establishing the rules, policies, and accountability for how data is managed and secured within an organization. This maintains data quality, security, and availability—principles the Data Champion implements to ensure business continuity and resilience.
The Data Champion becomes the leader of your data protection strategy, ensuring your business’s most valuable asset—its data—is both protected and accessible when needed.
Why Do Organizations Need a Data Protection Champion?
Risk Mitigation
Ransomware attacks are getting harder to anticipate and more sophisticated and frequent. With a 13% increase in cyberattacks over the past 5 years and average losses of $1.85 million per incident, this isn’t a risk you should be willing to take.
Without a Data Champion, ransomware will strike you unprepared, exposing your organization to revenue losses, loss of customer trust, disrupted operations, and even worse, complete business failure.
Data Champions actively mitigates risks by regularly testing and updating your data governance policies and ensuring your backup systems are immune to malware and data loss.
Having someone solely responsible for monitoring data backups and testing recovery processes is no longer optional.
Moreover, sleeper ransomware is increasingly targeting backup systems, lying dormant until triggered. A Data Champion is your first line of defense, ensuring that even your backups are secure from such malicious tactics.
Data Protection Strategy Owner
Data governance provides the framework for protecting and managing your data, but the Data Champion turns this into an operational reality. They lead the execution of the data protection strategy, ensuring that backups are not only performed but also tested for reliability.
They create a culture of accountability around data protection, where everyone in the business understands the value of data protection.
With the help of a dedicated Data Champion, you can align data governance with practical execution to ensure that your data is stored securely and will be available when disaster strikes.
Meet Cyber Liability Insurance Requirements
More and more businesses rely on cyber liability insurance to manage the financial fallout of a data breach or ransomware attack. However, many of these policies come with strict data protection requirements—they’re not designed to be your first line of defense as it’s more of a protective than a preventative measure.
To make the most out of your cyber insurance policy, you need a Data Champion who understands the complexity of cyber insurance and helps your company comply with their requirements, such as maintaining regular audits, backup tests, and monitoring protocols.
Lead Response to Ransomware Attacks
In the event of a ransomware attack, the Data Champion leads the organization’s response. They initiate the backup recovery process, collaborating with IT and external partners to restore data and ensure minimum downtime.
The average downtime companies experience after a ransomware attack is 24 days—that’s enough time to put your business into a state of bankruptcy.
Additionally, a Data Champion would prepare a disaster recovery plan for your organization in alignment with data governance best practices.
What Are the Responsibilities of a Data Champion?
Identify and Mitigate Risks
A Data Champion is constantly on the lookout for potential vulnerabilities within your data systems. They assess risks from both internal processes and external threats, ensuring your data is protected against ransomware, unauthorized access, and data loss.
Implement and Maintain Data Protection Policies and Procedures
The Data Champion develops, implements, and enforces data protection policies across your organization, which includes:
- Defining access controls
- Scheduling regular data backups and audits
- Ensuring compliance with both regional and international standards
Key Contributor to Business Continuity Planning Process
In case of a disaster, the Data Champion plays a key role in your business continuity plan. They ensure that your data protection strategies are integrated into your company’s broader continuity efforts, making sure that you can recover quickly with minimal data loss.
Educate the Organization on Data Security
Data security is everyone’s responsibility, not just the IT department’s. Everyone at your organization should put data security at the top of their priorities.
A Data Champion works to educate your entire organization on best practices in data security, ensuring that every employee understands how their actions impact overall data integrity.
Promote a Culture of Data Responsibility
Having the right policies in place is one thing, but fostering a culture where every employee takes responsibility for data security is just as important.
A Data Champion is your go-to person for promoting this culture, encouraging all staff to adhere to data protection policies and to view data security as a shared responsibility.
Find the Right Partner for Your Data Champion
A dedicated Data Champion is an invaluable asset, but they can’t do it alone.
Partnering with a data protection expert like Prodatix ensures your business has the tools and resources to maintain data security.
At Prodatix, we protect your business against sleeper ransomware, ensure backup integrity of your critical data, and help you meet local and federal compliance requirements.
Don’t have a Data Champion yet?
Talk to one of our Prodatix Veeam consultants today to learn how we can support your data protection strategy.