2022 Data Protection Predications

 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.

The ability to recover should be a focal point of any security plan. This will be defined by how quickly you can stand up your systems and get them running again. However, in our accelerated digital age, too much can happen overnight or in three to five days for the traditional back up model to be good enough. Recovery solutions need to modernize to fit what the world has become. They need to be continuous and able to keep applications running 24/7 even in the face of disruption or threat

Here are a few predictions being made for data protection in 2022

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.