The lifecycle of tech is shortening, and businesses need to wake up to the data management challenges this can cause them.
It has become common practice for people to chase the latest technology trends. As tech becomes part of our everyday life, the lifecycle of our devices becomes smaller and smaller. This is posing a huge issue to the sprawl of data. With the lifecycle of tech shortening, many are abandoning old devices at second-hand stores and selling them to new owners without thinking about the data and personal information that is left on them. The unforeseen jump to working from home in 2020 for large swathes of the population meant many organizations became virtual entities. Their operations and output became cloud-dependent, and huge volumes of company data – accessible across a range of employee devices – were transferred online. IT management teams face a serious ongoing challenge of controlling and managing their organization’s data online, which in many cases is near impossible. With data sprawling across company and personal devices, there is almost no control over it, especially in instances where staff sell their personal devices on to their next home, or throw them away. To add to this, wider workplace trends like BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) continue to gain popularity and make it harder for organizations to keep track of sensitive data. IT teams have less control over employees’ personal devices as it is, and so protecting the data on them becomes a real difficulty.
