The games industry has seen significant growth in 2020. Much of the growth has been attributed to people being forced to stay home due to COVID-19. Another contributing factor has increased revenue due to microtransactions. Often these have come under criticism, but their impact cannot be underestimated. Just as their impact on growth can’t be underestimated neither can the importance of protecting the terabytes of data by adding new customers, and maintaining existing infrastructure brings.
Popularity paints a Target
The popularity of some games has the unwanted side-effect of painting a target on developers, publishers, and users’ backs that cybercriminals look to exploit. As the gaming industry is targeted more frequently by hackers the importance of data protection becomes critical to future success, in an already fickle market. Online games no longer just gamer tags, email addresses, and game stats but actively process payments and deal with personally identifiable data. In summary, data that hackers dream about.
Given the high value attached to data handled by game developers and publishers having a proper backup policy can be vital in preventing a disaster from turning into a crisis. Along with protecting the smaller pieces of data, databases need to be backed up following a comprehensive policy complete with adequate technologies. Increasing in popularity is SAP HANA that offers a complete database suite and management tools. Further, carrying out a comprehensive sap hana backup is easy with several third-party tools available.
Important Considerations
Having a comprehensive backup policy is important in developing a holistic data protection policy that benefits the company and the gamers who have spent hours enjoying their favourite game. Gamers also tend to be an unforgiving bunch when disaster strikes, and they cannot log onto a server and play. Unplanned downtime over extended periods doesn’t just anger the user base but is bad for business. While games like Fortnite still are the king of the hill, if more data protection issues arise, like when stolen accounts were being sold on underground hacker forums that popularity my soon nose dive.
Failures in protecting data are not only bad for business but may cause a host of lawsuits in the future. Given that games, companies process payments and store personally identifiable information on their customers, they are now required to be compliant with a host of laws and best practices. If not, regulators can issue fines that can rack up into the millions of dollars. Further class action suits may be levelled at a company that suffers a major data breach.
Conclusion
More and more businesses are moving to data-driven business models, the games industry is no different in this regard. Along with placing data on such a high pedestal comes the need to protect it. Successfully companies will not only be those who make the best use of the data they generate but those who adequately protect that data from mishaps and more malicious individuals.
