It shouldn’t be news to anyone that ransomware is the cybersecurity challenge of the moment. As we head into a new year, it’s important everyone gains a clear understanding of how attackers are evolving and how best to strategically protect organizations from attacks and the impact they have on business.
Attackers are getting smarter,
and the payouts are getting larger and more widespread. As a CEO or CIO of an
organization, it’s irresponsible at this point not to have a proven ransomware
response plan. Any organization can fit the target characteristics for today’s
cybercriminals, and it’s become simply a matter of time until your
organization’s number is up.
Businesses will reconsider
on-premises data centers in favor of cloud
Many companies that moved
applications into the public cloud are now considering a reverse migration –
back to their on-premises data centers / centres for three main reasons:
cost creep, data sovereignty requirements, and IT management control.
Cloud fees can be unpredictable, and many businesses struggle to control the
insidious growth of workloads and instances. Many also want to avoid ‘egress’
fees charged for removing data from the cloud.
In addition to cost, some organizations are subject to GDPR and other
regulations that require them to ensure their customers’ data stays within the
borders of the company home office country. If the cloud vendor does not have a
data center in their geographic location, these so-called data sovereignty regulations
may require them to move their workload and data back on premises.
A third common reason for
moving back on premise is to regain some of the IT control that is given up to
cloud vendors. While cloud vendors assume the IT burden and responsibility for
system maintenance, they also take control of when and how that maintenance is
performed. For critical applications with high availability SLAs, excess or
inconveniently timed downtime can cost tens of thousands of dollars and more
than justify moving workloads back on prem.
More
investment in disaster recovery
Climate change and social unrest have moved the need for
disaster recovery to the forefront of IT focus. DR planning is no longer a
matter of factoring in the rare ‘once in 100 years storm’ or ‘once in a
lifetime earthquake’. Natural disasters have become an increasingly common
threat to business operations. Companies will spend more on DR in 2022 and look
for more flexible deployment options for protection, such as replicating
on-premises workloads to the cloud, or use of multi-node failover clustering
across cloud availability zones and regions.
High
availability protection for storage will become standard
Climate change and natural disaster threats have also shown IT
teams that simple backup of data storage is no longer sufficient. Regardless of
whether the storage is NFS, SAN, cloud-native shared storage, or replicated
local storage, companies will need to implement a more sophisticated way to
handle DR. They will increase protection levels for their data storage – both
on premises and in the cloud – to include high availability and disaster
protection.
Container
complexity will limit adoption for production workloads
Containers are continuing to make the headlines and are destined
to be applied in more use cases throughout the IT infrastructure. The benefits
of containers are proven in DevOps environments but their complexity, coupled
with constraints on IT resources and the complex architecture of many
applications, databases, and ERP systems will limit their adoption in
production environments. Companies will continue to run complicated
applications, databases, and ERPs in traditional on-premises and cloud
environments. They will use application-aware HA/DR clustering to reduce
complexity of these environments while ensuring they are protected from
downtime.
The Resurgence of Tape
as a Critical Component of Cyber-Resilient Infrastructure
According to a recent study by ESG Research of more than 300 IT
and line of business executives, two out of five respondents reported that
their organizations had experienced successful ransomware attacks. Even more
startling is the fact that more than 80% had paid ransoms to retrieve their
data.
And the data landscape is changing, with exponential growth in
unstructured data that is at the core of digital transformation, AI and machine
learning initiatives. This “new” data is what is driving businesses forward. It
has unique requirements, must be kept for many years and decades, layering on
new challenges around cyber-security and protection of this valuable data.
In 2022 and beyond, enterprises will shift more focus and
investment toward building cyber-resilient infrastructure for this type of data
– in other words building infrastructure with cyber-security in mind. Tape
storage systems are a critical part of these cyber-resilient infrastructures,
particularly for long term data storage. The world’s largest cloud providers
now use tape at massive scale in their data centers, and enterprises are
quickly adopting a similar approach. This is a new way to use tape, not the old
paradigm – with both the use cases and architectures looking fundamentally
different. Over the next few years, every enterprise and every organization
that is generating large amounts of data will need to leverage these same
architectures and practices.
