DEALING WITH DATA PROTECTION

AHMED EID, DIRECTOR – PRESALES, META, DELL TECHNOLOGIES, SAYS DATA GROWTH, MULTI-CLOUD AND AS A SERVICE MODELS WILL DISRUPT DATA PROTECTION THIS YEAR

We are a quarter of the way through 2022, and the profound changes we are seeing in the world at large will only accelerate trends that are driving IT forward in the year ahead. IT continues to adapt to trends like multi-cloud, massive unstructured data growth and the use of as a service models.

These are the shifts we expect to see, where ensuring security and protection will be a critical priority in the year ahead:

Data Protection

It is anyone’s guess when the next cyberattack is going to target your business as highly sophisticated malignant actors can come from all corners. It is time to tighten up, and proactively take steps to protect your business against cyber attackers. Advanced data protection is one tool in the arsenal that can allow rapid recovery from ransomware attacks. In combination with a strong security discipline, including twofactor authentication, network intrusion monitoring, and good hygiene around keeping systems up to date with the latest patches, a company can significantly improve its resilience against attacks.

The Need for Air-gapped Cyber Vaults Businesses will continue to deploy strongly secured cyber vaults as a physically or logically air-gapped systems, protected from their larger networks and therefore less vulnerable to attack. These systems provide a high-confidence backup target, enabling rapid restoration of businessprocesses, data and applications should a ransomware attack occur. They combine this with active defenses of their networks and data stores, rapid detection of intrusion and pro-active response planning to ensure business continuity and privacy of confidential data.

As more companies take multi-cloud approaches to storing data, you can also expect them to move critical data away from the attack surface by physically and logically isolating it from access within public clouds through a secure, automated, operational air gap.

Data Protection at the Edge Data is increasingly becoming decentralised. According to Gartner, 75% of enterprise-generated data will be created and kept outside a traditional data center or cloud by 2025. Relatively little of that data is coming from humans. It’s generated by machines, sensors and cameras and often it won’t even be brought back to core data centers or clouds. Over the next year, you can expect businesses to seek out holistic ways of securing their data at the edge that originate at the infrastructure layer.

While many companies have long had remote sites with data, the enterprise network is expanding to include a much larger IT footprint at edge sites. Here the digital world directly meets the physical world. In the year ahead, customers will increase their use of secure backup solutions, whether distributed to edge sites or centralised, to protect edge generated data. They will also seek ways to extend data security to the edge, and to eliminate vulnerability to network intrusion at edge sites.

Remote Workforce Over the last few years, we’ve transitioned to a more remote workforce. Companies commonly have thousands of employees working remotely, all with network access. As organisations continue to adapt to growing security concerns in hybrid work environments, Dell’s latest study finds that 74% of companies agree that remote work has caused their exposure to data loss from cyber threats to increase. In the year ahead, companies will seek ways to extend data security to remote workers.

As a Service

Businesses will continue to migrate workloads to as a service models, including everything from application hosting runtimes to underlying compute and storage infrastructure. The security requirements for such infrastructure are just as great as traditionally installed, managed and consumed infrastructure, but with the added complexity that the infrastructure is often located in a shared co-location.

Adoption of Multi-cloud

Companies will continue to adopt a multi-cloud model in the year ahead. As enterprises look to bring more and more of their applications to public cloud, they’ll also need enterprisegrade solutions and services for their workloads that are integrated with their on-premises infrastructure stacks. A recent Forrester study revealed that 83% of organisations have adopted a multi-cloud approach or plan to within the next 12 months. With that growth, we’ll see an increased reliance on multi-cloud-enabled data protection for virtualised and containerised workloads, databases, and network-attached storage (NAS) file systems.