For our 5th annual Insight Jam LIVE! Solutions Review editors sourced this resource guide of data protection predictions for 2024 from Insight Jam, its new community of enterprise tech experts.

Note: Data protection predictions are listed in the order we received them.

Data Protection Predictions from Experts for 2024

Bobby Cornwell, Vice President Strategic Partner Enablement & Integration at SonicWall

Expect to See New Regulations for Reporting Breaches

“In 2024, incoming cybersecurity regulations will force businesses to be more transparent about their breaches and attacks. Forthcoming legislation such as the EU’s NIS2 Directive and the Cyber Resilience Act will impose more stringent standards for cyber protection and establish clear reporting timelines in the event of a breach. As these directives take effect, businesses will be made to share with their partners and suppliers early identifications of system vulnerabilities or face fines. The aim of this is to prevent cybercriminals from inflicting widespread damage across multiple businesses. In 2024, it will be crucial to optimize the transparency afforded by these regulations, and by dragging cybercriminals out into the open, authorities can more effectively curtail their illicit activity.”

Samir Zaveri, Practice Manager – Package Led Transformation at Wipro

Future of Data Protection in Hybrid Cloud Deployments

“On one hand, hybrid cloud adoption will continue to grow exponentially and on other hand, organizations are looking to repatriate workloads back to private clouds. Data protection in a single cloud environment was already a challenge and with data distributed across multiple clouds and cloud service provider,s the challenge has grown even more. Today, organizations are having a one-to-one mapping between source clouds and data backup, and disaster recovery sites lead to multiple standard operating procedures and multiple points of data thefts along with inconsistent recovery SLAs.”

To overcome these challenges, organizations will need to adopt new capabilities

“Full workload portability is one of them. With portability, organizations have the ability to deploy workloads across different cloud service providers without having to adapt to each environment and with no changes needed to the application or the infrastructure. Portability will give organizations a way to consolidate multiple sources into one single data backup and disaster recovery site, as well as consolidate standard operating procedures (SOPs), all with consistent recovery SLAs.”

Eyal Arazi, Cloud Security Manager at Radware

Migration to the cloud will slow down as companies reverse course

“During the past few years, there has been a rapid adoption of multi-cloud strategies, with organizations often using three, four and even five different cloud environments. The problem, however, is that while organizations accumulated more cloud platforms, they ignored the problems of cross-cloud security consistency, visibility and management.

A recent survey commissioned by Radware suggests that now organizations are starting to reverse course. Despite the ongoing discussion about “the great cloud migration” and the abandonment of on-premises environments, approximately three quarters of organizations not only still use these environments but expect usage to increase in the next 12 months. Based on the report, look for more companies to consolidate their cloud environments from three or more to one or two platforms in 2024. While there will be consolidation around the cloud, most organizations will continue to maintain a combination of public cloud and on prem platforms, resulting in a hybrid environment.”

Andrew Moloney, Chief Strategy Officer at SoftIron

Cloud strategy moves from “fashionable to rational” 

“Moving from an era when proposing a full-scale migration to the public cloud was a sure-fire way to promotion, the current maturation of the market, economic conditions, shifting performance requirements, and a dramatic simplification in building private cloud-native infrastructure, will see a much more rational approach. Underpinning this will be a broader understanding of the difference between cloud “the model” and cloud the “place”, where how applications are built is decoupled from where they operate.”

A sovereign cloud shake out 

“We predict that many of the “pseudo” sovereign cloud projects – those that rely on obfuscated infrastructure and/or local third parties to operate them to provide a veneer of sovereignty, will not gain traction. AWS, late to the party to offer such a service and having recently launched their European Sovereign Cloud may well be delivering too little, too late. Instead, those that offer true sovereign resilience – enabling nation-states to build, operate, inspect, and audit their own infrastructure on their own terms and turf, will become the preferred option.”

VMware acquisition accelerates the adoption of cloud-native infrastructure 

“Forced into seeking credible alternatives to using VMware to provide virtualized infrastructure in on-prem. data centers, existing VMware customers will take the opportunity to revisit their cloud strategy, making the rational decision to shift to a fully cloud-native infrastructure – one able to consolidate and simplify existing virtualized on-prem. workloads within an infrastructure able to deliver true private cloud going forward will grasp that opportunity. Finally, they will be able to deliver what VMware and Nutanix have promised for years but have never quite been able to deliver.”

A renaissance for Private Cloud 

“Partially related to our VMWare prediction, and the availability of cloud-native infrastructure that changes the economics of private cloud, the evolution of a more rational cloud strategy will see Cloud Centers of Excellence (CCoEs) and FinOps professionals grasp the opportunity to get an apples-to-apples comparison across not just public clouds, but now between public and private cloud. New open standards released in 2024, such as FOCUS will help to enable this.

At the same time, shifts to distributed cloud architectures, enabling workloads to move to the edge to the core and back will elevate the need to make private clouds more than just basic virtualized infrastructure.”

The death of “Hyper-Converged” 

“Already effectively abandoned by its greatest exponent, Nutanix, the independent and elastic scaling limitations inherent in these architectures, plus their failures to fully deliver on a fully cloud-native environment without significant integrations and third parties will see hyperconvergence relegated from the data center to smaller, departmental type solutions only.”

Software-defined fades, hardware, and hard tech get sexy again 

“Fuelled by the hype around AI and the investments being made in the processing power to support it, we predict we’ll see a resurgence in interest in innovation right in hardware, and the hard tech required to support that. A new generation of start-ups will disrupt the inertia in innovation in IT infrastructure design of the last couple of decades.”

Thomas Chauchefoin, Vulnerability Research at Sonar

AI-Assisted attacks to become more sophisticated and automated

“IT security attacks leveraging AI are expected to become more sophisticated and automated. Hackers will likely use AI to analyze vast amounts of data and launch targeted attacks. AI-driven phishing attackers capable of generating highly convincing and personalized messages, which trick users into revealing sensitive information, may increase. Furthermore, AI-powered malware could adapt and evolve in real time, making it more challenging for traditional antimalware detection systems to keep up.”

Stacy Hayes, Co-Founder and EVP, Americas at Assured Data Protection

“The managed services model will become increasingly attractive to traditional VARs in 2024, especially with more and more businesses looking to buy cloud and IT services on a usage basis. But making the transition from a traditional VAR to a provider of managed services is easier said than done. It’s not that VARs aren’t capable of diversifying, far from it, it’s just that the switch requires a fundamental shift in the way VARs do business and that isn’t something you can just change overnight. These large organizations are not built for this new world model. The in-house build and integration of new technology and go-to-market models takes too long and is too expensive to implement. VARs simply don’t have the people, the flexibility or the know how. With the economic headwinds as they are, Opex is king and no-one has the Capex or the appetite for big in-house builds.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for VARs to provide a large portfolio of products and services to the standards customers demand. The speed the market moves, the reliance on data, all add to greater demands from customers. It is evident channel businesses are struggling to deliver what their customers want, whether it be on-premises or in the cloud. It is a common topic and one I believe means VARs need to clearly understand what they can deliver themselves, and what they need to outsource. Outsourcing, white labelling, is a great way to deliver a high quality and diverse portfolio to customers.

MSPs that have the know-how to use utility based models effectively, that can execute immediately, have experts in the space and deliver services tailored for the vendor, customer, end user will be the partners of choice for VARs in 2024.”

Jim Liddle, Chief Innovation Officer at Nasuni

2024 will be a make-or-break year for data intelligence  

“Following the booming interest in AI in 2023, enterprises will face increased pressure from their boards to leverage AI to gain a competitive edge. That rush for an AI advantage is surfacing deeper data infrastructure issues that have been mounting for years. Before they can integrate AI effectively, organizations will first have to address how they collect, store, and manage their unstructured data, particularly at the edge.

AI doesn’t work in a vacuum and it’s just one part of the broader data intelligence umbrella. Many organizations have already implemented data analytics, machine learning and AI into their sales, customer support, and similar low-hanging initiatives, but struggle to integrate the technology in more sophisticated, high-value applications. 

Visibility, for example, is a crucial and often-overlooked first step towards data intelligence. A shocking number of companies store massive volumes of data simply because they don’t know what’s in it or whether they need it. Is the data accurate and up-to-date? Is it properly classified and ‘searchable’? Is it compliant? Does it contain personal identifiable information (PII), protected health information (PHI), or other sensitive information? Is it available on-demand or archived?  

In the coming year, companies across the board will be forced to come to terms with the data quality, governance, access, and storage requirements of AI before they can move forward with digital transformation or improvement programs to give them the desired competitive edge.” 

2024 will be the year of reckoning for both ransomware and compliance 

“The risk of ransomware and sophisticated attacks is ever-growing and will continue to spread internationally in 2024. Preventing the theft, encryption, misuse, or exposure of sensitive data will remain a daily concern for organizations indefinitely. Multi-layer protection has quickly become a matter of hygiene and even companies that invested in sophisticated, global ransomware protection products will need a belt and braces approach in the form of network, application, and access security, coupled with rapid data recovery solutions. 

Ransomware has typically been more prevalent in the US, with larger organizations and their larger data sets presenting more attractive targets for bad actors. In 2024, we’ll see more ransomware incidents in the UK as government agencies, health services, and critical infrastructure in both countries continue to lack the technology and funding to build adequate data protection and recovery capabilities. 

Organizations that haven’t addressed their data protection and recovery posture are now risking both security and compliance headaches, as regulatory penalties and recovery costs often outmatch ransom payouts. Europe still leads in data governance and regulation with the likes of GDPR, but legislation like the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is quickly spreading across the US. By delaying their investment in protection and compliance solutions until forced to, many large organizations will soon face the possibility of steep penalties, ransom demands, and business disruption simultaneously.” 

Russ Kennedy, Chief Product Officer at Nasuni

Enterprises will embrace hybrid infrastructure or fall behind 

“The next revolution in data will occur at the edge. After years of conflicting definitions and uncertainty, today’s leading businesses are realizing the necessity of truly hybrid infrastructure. To remain competitive in a data-driven world, enterprises need high performance processing at the edge, where data is generated, in combination with the scale, capacity, and advanced tools available in the cloud.  

Traditionally, large companies have used legacy storage vendors and traditional backup solutions to store and protect petabyte volumes of data. These legacy infrastructures are a performance bottleneck and can’t support the pace of growth, as analyst William Blair recently highlighted.  

Over the next few years, we’ll see more organizations realize it’s not one or the other, but a combination of edge and cloud storage. According to Gartner, 50 percent of critical infrastructure applications will reside outside of the public cloud through 2027. Manufacturers, for example, need to quickly capture and consolidate the critical data coming from their physical systems and processes across the world, while keeping and leveraging that data for analytics year after year. Ready or not, we’ll see this edge-cloud mechanism force organizations to adopt and embrace truly hybrid infrastructure and ultimately transform their ability to drive more effective innovations and respond in a more agile way to customer’s evolving needs.” 

Organizations will continue to grapple with data infrastructure to support hybrid work long after the pandemic 

“The genie is out of the bottle and hybrid or remote is here to stay. Though the greatest economic upheavals have hopefully passed, we’re seeing the residual effects. Many companies are still trying to design or optimize infrastructure to accommodate hybrid work and reconfigured supply chains.  

Though organizations worked quickly to spin up the necessary systems, they simply weren’t designed to support thousands of remote workers. Inevitably, workers started using whatever tools necessary to collaborate, and many businesses saw a significant increase in shadow IT tools outside of sanctioned corporate IT programs. As we enter 2024, IT organizations are still grappling with the effects of remote work on top of mounting pressure to reduce costs and regain control of their disparate and sprawling corporate data assets. 

Some have tried to remedy the issue by mandating employees back into the office, but to attract and retain appropriate talent, businesses will need to provide enhanced multi-team collaboration options and the data infrastructure to scale it. Those that have the right data access solutions in place to streamline processes and remote collaboration will succeed in the hybrid work economy.” 

Matt Waxman, Senior Vice President and GM for Data Protection at Veritas Technologies

The first end-to-end AI-powered robo-ransomware attack will usher in a new era of cybercrime pain for organizations

“Nearly two-thirds (65 percent) of organizations experienced a successful ransomware attack over the past two years in which an attacker gained access to their systems. While startling in its own right, this is even more troubling when paired with recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI). Already, tools like WormGPT make it easy for attackers to improve their social engineering with AI-generated phishing emails that are much more convincing than those we’ve previously learned to spot. In 2024, cybercriminals will put AI into full effect with the first end-to-end AI-driven autonomous ransomware attacks. Beginning with robocall-like automation, eventually AI will be put to work identifying targets, executing breaches, extorting victims and then depositing ransoms into attackers’ accounts, all with alarming efficiency and little human interaction.”

Targeted cell-level data corruption will make ransomware more dangerous than ever

“As more organizations become better prepared to recover from ransomware attacks without paying ransoms, cybercriminals will be forced to continue evolving. In 2024, we expect hackers to turn to targeted cell-level data corruption attacks—code secretly implanted deep within a victim’s database that lies in wait to covertly alter or corrupt specific but undisclosed data if the target refuses to pay a ransom. The real threat is that victims will not know what data—if any, the hackers could be bluffing—has been altered or corrupted until after the repercussions set in, thus effectively rendering all their data untrustworthy. The only solution is to ensure they have secure copies of their data that they are 100 percent certain are uncorrupted and can be rapidly restored.”

Adaptive data protection will autonomously fight hackers without organizations lifting a finger

“More than two-thirds of organizations are looking to boost their cyber resiliency with the help of AI. But, given AI’s dual nature as a force for both good and bad, the question going forward will be whether organizations’ AI-powered protection can evolve ahead of hackers’ AI-powered attacks. Part of that evolution in 2024 will be the emergence of AI-driven adaptive data protection. AI tools will be able to constantly monitor for changes in behavioral patterns to see if users might have been compromised. If the AI detects unusual activity, it can respond autonomously to increase their level of protection. For example, initiating more regular backups, sending them to differently optimized targets and overall creating a safer environment in defense against bad actors.”

Generative AI-focused data compliance regulations will impact adoption

“For all its potential use cases, generative AI also carries heavy risks, not the least of which are data privacy concerns. Organizations that fail to put proper guardrails in place to stop employees from potentially breaching existing privacy regulations through the inappropriate use of generative AI tools are playing a dangerous game that is likely to bring significant consequences. Over the past 12 months, the average organization that experienced a data breach resulting in regulatory noncompliance shelled out more than US$336,000 in fines. Right now, most regulatory bodies are focused on how existing data privacy laws apply to generative AI, but as the technology continues to evolve, expect generative AI-specific legislation in 2024 that applies rules directly to these tools and the data used to train them.”

For every organization that makes the jump to the cloud, another will develop an on-premises datacenter as hybrid cloud equilibrium sets in

“The percentage of data stored in the cloud versus on-premises has steadily grown to the point where it is estimated that 57 percent of data is now stored in the cloud with 43% on-premises. That growth has come from both mature companies with on-premises foundations making the jump to the cloud, and newer companies building their infrastructure in the cloud from the ground up. But both categories of organizations are learning that, for all its benefits, the cloud is not ideally suited for all applications and data. This is leading many companies that made the jump to the cloud to partially repatriate their data and cloud-native companies to supplement their cloud infrastructure with on-premises computing and storage resources. As a result, in 2024, we’ll see hybrid cloud equilibrium—for every organization that makes to the move to the cloud, another will build an on-premises datacenter.”

Cassius Rhue, VP of Customer Experience at SIOS Technology

Application high availability becomes universal

“As reliance on applications continues to rise, IT teams will be pressured to deliver efficient high availability for applications once considered non-essential. Once reserved for mission-critical systems, such as SQL Server, Oracle, SAP, and HANA, application high availability – typically delivered with HA clustering technology – will become a requirement for more systems, applications, and services throughout the enterprise.”

Cloud and OS agnostic high availability becomes an expected requirement for most applications

“IT teams will look for application HA solutions that are consistent across operating systems and cloud reducing complexity and improving cost-efficiency. As the need for HA rises, companies running applications in both on-prem and cloud environments as well as those running applications in both Windows and Linux environments will look to streamline their application environments with HA solutions that deliver a consistent user interface across all of their environments and also for matching cloud and OS technical support and services from the HA vendor.”

The trend toward migration to SAP HANA is likely to continue in 2024

“The mandatory 2027 migration will push more companies to migrate to SAP HANA. As companies migrate to SAP HANA there will be an increased need for more sophisticated and flexible high availability and disaster recovery solutions that help them bridge the gap between existing systems and the new, more modern systems that take advantage of SAP HANA’s capabilities. Organizations will look for HA solutions that help them find ways to take advantage of emerging technologies and accelerate digital transformation, while not losing the HA and DR capabilities that continue to arise.”

Automation becomes more common in high availability and disaster recovery efforts as data and analytics increase complexity

“As the volume and variety of data as well as the channels through which data are collected increase, organizations will require more information about why faults/failures occurred and how to address potential issues. Automation and orchestration tools will play a central role, streamlining root cause analysis, improving intelligent responses, and enhancing disaster recovery processes to further reduce downtime and enhance data availability.”

The focus on data security and compliance will intensify

“The focus on data retention, security, and access controls will intensify prompting organizations to integrate enhanced security measures deeper into their high availability and disaster recovery solutions, services, and strategies. As the volume and variety of data as well as the channels through which data are collected and processed increase, organizations will require more security measures to be baked into their solutions.”

Sophisticated storage and DR strategies will become crucial to the demands of an increasingly dynamic and data-driven business landscape

“As the volume of unstructured data continues to surge, storage solutions are expected to prioritize scalability, tiered performance, and accessibility. Enterprises will also adopt more sophisticated and resilient DR strategies using multiple high availability (HA) nodes, and DR technologies that understand the complexity of tiered storage solutions. Cloud storage is expected to continue its ascendancy, with organizations increasingly relying on scalable and flexible cloud solutions to meet their expanding data requirements. At the same time, a growing number of companies will look to move workloads out of the cloud to on-prem environments in favor of more predictable costs and greater control over their environments.”

Justin Borgman, Co-Founder and CEO at Starburst

All things make a comeback and on-prem storage is having a resurgence

“Companies including Dell have heavily invested in their EMC portfolio. Enterprise customers will continue to recognize that enhancing on-premise storage hardware presents the faster path to mitigating rising cloud expenses. This modernization will allow companies to manage data gravity for on-premise data that cannot be easily relocated, ensuring a more efficient approach.”

Haoyuan Li, Founder and CEO at Alluxio

Hybrid and Multi-cloud Acceleration

“In 2024, the adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud strategies is expected to accelerate, both for strategic and tactical reasons. From a strategic standpoint, organizations will aim to avoid vendor lock-in and will want to retain sensitive data on-premises while still utilizing the scalable resources offered by cloud services. Tactically, due to the continued scarcity of GPUs, companies will seek to access GPUs or specific resources and services that are unique to certain cloud providers. A seamless combination of cross-region and cross-cloud services will become essential, enabling businesses to enhance performance, flexibility, and efficiency without compromising data sovereignty.”

From Specialized Storage to Optimized Commodity Storage for AI Platform

“The growth of AI workloads has driven the adoption of specialized high-performance computing (HPC) storage optimized for speed and throughput. But in 2024, we expect a shift towards commoditized storage. Cloud object stores, NVMe flash, and other storage solutions will be optimized for cost-efficient scalability. The high cost and complexity of specialized storage will give way to flexible, cheaper, easy-to-manage commodity storage tailored for AI needs, allowing more organizations to store and process data-intensive workloads using cost-effective solutions.”

Jimmy Tam, CEO at Peer Software

Active-Passive High Availability Practices Evolve – Active-Active Has its Moment

“Without continuous availability and real-time access to data, businesses risk losing out to competitors, making decisions with inaccurate information, and more. So it is no wonder that CIOs are starting to demand more from their data centers. In the coming 12 months, it is likely that many IT leaders will start to adopt active-active capabilities, improving performance by distributing the workload across several nodes to allow access to the resources of all servers. 

By moving away from active-passive technologies that simply don’t make the most of the available servers and often require manual intervention during outages, CIOs will ensure that data is actionable wherever it resides, is as close as possible to the end-user for performance, and that the load of data processing is spread across all compute and storage nodes whether it be at the edge, in the data center, or in the cloud.”

The storage industry will start to productize AI and ML 

“AI and Machine Learning have so much promise, but they’re not being adopted as quickly as anyone in the industry anticipated. There’s a clear reason why: users simply don’t know how to realize the technologies’ full potential. Beyond ChatGPT, which is easy to use and incredibly popular, there’s no real out-of-the-box product for enterprise storage customers. So unless organizations have a data scientist on hand to help them navigate the intricacies of AI and ML, they’re very likely to hold off when it comes to implementing any kind of solution.

This presents a great opportunity for the storage industry and the smart companies are already starting to think about it. Through 2024, we’ll see the beginning of the productization of AI and ML. Ready-to-use packages will be developed so that users can easily understand what the technologies can help them achieve, while being straightforward to set up and run. Then watch, as AI and ML adoption increases.”

Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is here to stay – but much will move back on-premise

“When Covid hit, VDIs were the reason many of us could continue to work. They offered users a flexible, consistent experience from wherever they logged in and became a lynchpin for organizations during the days of lockdown. But there was an issue: the hardware was difficult to get hold of. And the urgency we all became so used to during the pandemic meant there was no time to wait for the supply chain to right itself, so CIOs turned to the cloud. 

Don’t get me wrong, the cloud has clear benefits. It is easy to implement, and it is elastic in nature, quickly responding to and growing with our needs. But it can be very expensive and, because cloud providers tend to charge for each transaction, costs can be difficult to predict. Availability in the supply chain, will bring about a shift towards migrating highly transactional workloads back on-premise. Unhappy with writing blank checks, CFOs will rightly start to ask CIOs to demonstrate ROI and explain the cost difference between cloud and on-premise.”

JB Baker, Vice President of Marketing & Product Management at ScaleFlux

Sustainable Data Storage Becomes a Priority

“With sustainability rising as an urgent priority across industries, data storage solutions will be under increasing pressure to reduce their environmental impact. Organizations are ramping up investments in energy-efficient technologies to meet emissions requirements and goals. Data storage, projected to account for 14 percent of the global carbon footprint by 2040, will be a key focus area.

To minimize the footprint of the data center, storage leaders will need to look beyond device-level specs and take a solution-wide view. The criteria will expand to encompass data compression, energy expenditure, workload optimization, and more. The goal is to maximize efficiency and minimize power consumption across the storage infrastructure. As sustainability becomes a competitive differentiator, we will see rapid innovation in “green” data storage technologies, architectures, and management techniques. The storage domain will play a critical role in driving the sustainability transformation.”

Anand Babu, Co-Founder & CEO at MinlO

Unstructured data becomes a core enterprise challenge

“Over the last few years, we have seen explosive growth in the semi-structured data world (log files, models, snapshots, artifactory code) which has, in turn, driven the growth of object storage.”

“In 2024, we’ll see an enterprise explosion of truly unstructured data (audio, video, meeting recordings, talks, presentations) as AI applications take flight. This is highly ‘learnable’ content from an AI perspective and gathering it into the AI data lake will greatly enhance the intelligence capacity of the enterprise as a whole, but it also comes with unique challenges.”

“There are distinct challenges with maintaining performance at 10s of petabytes. Those generally cannot be solved with traditional SAN/NAS solutions — they require the attributes of a modern, highly performant object store. This is why most of the AI/ML technologies (I.e. OpenAI, Anthropic, Kubeflow), leverage object stores and why most databases are moving to be object storage centric.”

Jon France, CISO at ISC2

We’ll see an evolution, rather than a revolution of regulations

“The regulatory landscape will continue to stay hot – I think we’ll see more regulations governing AI and privacy in particular, and we’ll likely see more backlash around reporting requirements and a push for agencies to define what should actually be reported and at what thresholds of materiality. However, I don’t see a major overhaul coming. Instead, I think what we’ll see is sectors grappling with the tangible effects of the requirements that have been introduced. We’re no longer looking at these regulations as being on the horizon…in 2024, they’ll have to be adhered to. With this, I hope to see increased harmonization of regulations globally, so that multinational companies don’t run into navigational issues of not knowing which regulations and policies to follow and which don’t apply. We’re starting to see increased communication on a global scale, but we’re not there yet. It may be wishful thinking, but I predict we’ll see major global powers collaborating on what a cyber secure world should look like, and making policy decisions based on those discussions.”

Mark Cassetta, Chief Product Officer at Axiomatics

With recent legislation, the security market is poised to shift focus

“2023 saw a number of notable startups, especially incorporating Generative AI into their offerings. As fast as enterprises have started to adopt the usage, legislation has been discussed and shared to try to further protect the US identity and economy. This means that in 2024, just as both the mobile (MDM) and cloud platform shifts (CASB) created their security categories, we will see the same very quickly formally emerge for Generative AI.”

Giorgio Regni, CTO at Scality

HDDs will live on, despite predictions of a premature death

“Some all-flash vendors prognosticate the end of spinning disk (HDD) media in the coming years. While flash media and solid state drives (SSDs) have clear benefits when it comes to latency, are making major strides in density, and the cost per GB is declining, we see HDDs holding a 3-5x density/cost advantage over high-density SSDs through 2028.

Therefore, the current call for HDD end-of-life is akin to the tape-is-dead arguments from 20 years ago. In a similar way, HDDs will likely survive for the foreseeable future as they continue to provide workload-specific value.”

End users will discover the value of unstructured data for AI

“The meteoric rise of large language models (LLMs) over the past year highlights the incredible potential they hold for organizations of all sizes and industries. They primarily leverage structured, or text-based, training data. In the coming year, businesses will discover the value of their vast troves of unstructured data, in the form of images and other media.

This unstructured data will become a useful source of insights through AI/ML tooling for image recognition applications in healthcare, surveillance, transportation, and other business domains. Organizations will store petabytes of unstructured data in scalable “lakehouses” that can feed this unstructured data to AI-optimized services in the core, edge and public cloud as needed to gain insights faster.”

Ransomware detection will be the next advancement in data protection solutions

“In recent years, the tech industry has made tremendous strides in protecting data against all manner of threats, including increasingly destructive malware and ransomware. This is exemplified by the rise of immutability in data protection and data storage solutions, especially for backup data.

While data protection and restoration are a major cornerstone that serves as a critical last line of defense in a layered cybersecurity infrastructure, new advancements in AI-generated ransomware detection capabilities will emerge in data protection and storage solutions in 2024.”

Managed services will become key to resolving the complexity of hybrid cloud

“Multi-cloud is a reality today for most enterprises, in their use of multiple SaaS and IaaS offerings from different vendors. However, the use of on-premises and public cloud in a single application or workload has become mired in the complexities of different application deployment models and multiple vendor APIs and orchestration frameworks.

While this has inhibited the powerful agility and cost-reduction promises of the hybrid-cloud model, throughout the coming year, organizations will increasingly leverage the experience and skills of managed service providers (MSPs) to solve these complexity issues and help them achieve business value and ROI.”

Amer Deeba, CEO and Co-Founder at Normalyze

SEC Regulations Will Impact The One Area We Don’t Want to Talk About: Your Data 

“As we know, the new SEC transparency requirements and ruling now requires public companies to disclose cybersecurity posture annually and cyber incidents within four days after determining an incident was material. In 2024, this major policy shift will have a significant effect on one key area: data, forcing businesses to think about security with data at the forefront. In response, enterprises will dedicate both effort and budget to support the SEC’s data-first strategy – implementing best practices that assure shareholders that their company’s most valuable asset – data – is protected. In 2024, companies will need to discover where their data resides and who can access it, while proactively remediating risks that have the highest monetary impact in the event of a breach. When faced with this dilemma companies will lean on automation, specifically end-to-end, automated solutions that center on a holistic approach.

The recent ALPHV/Black Cat and MeridianLink breach underscores the importance for businesses of understanding exactly what data they have, where it lives, and how it is protected. In order to answer critical questions with confidence in the event of a breach and lower the probability of a breach, companies need to build better defenses. The risk of exposure/tagging is not novel, but with these new disclosure requirements, securing the target of such attacks – the data – has gone from a good first practice to an absolute necessity.  Being proactive means that if a breach does occur, you can respond quickly, answer these critical questions, be in compliance with the SEC requirements, and most importantly — respond. To summarize, in 2024 we’ll see organizations separated by their approach to data security. With these regulations, there is no alternative. Organizations must effectively remediate risks to lucrative sensitive data before breaches occur. Only this will allow organizations to respond decisively and confidently if an incident occurs.” 

To Address the Influx of Data, Security Teams Must Approach Data Security Like a Team Sport

“As AI booms, the industry is facing increasing complexity and an influx of data, and companies are grappling with how to keep it all secure. In the height of AI technology adoption, companies will need to refocus in 2024 on what matters most – protecting their data as it gets used by machine learning modes and new AI technologies. Businesses need to change their approach: the success of the coming year for organizations big and small will come back to how they do so. The challenges that this will bring require the profound depth and efficiencies of AI and automated processes to ensure protection of cloud-resident sensitive data. As demands around data change in 2024, organizations will need to invest in their security and cloud ops teams, approaching data security like a team sport, building more efficient shared responsibility models to better protect data. These teams can then regain visibility of all data stores within an enterprise’s cloud or on-premises environment and trace possible attack paths, overprovisioned access, and risks that can lead to data exposure. Only by identifying the approach to data, ensuring permissions and privileges and efficiently implementing AI will companies enable their teams to be successful in 2024.” 

Raul Martynek, CEO at DataBank

The AI cloud wars between hyperscalers will take center stage

“With Google’s latest investment in Anthropic, together with Microsoft’s stake in OpenAI as well as Nvidia’s support for GPU-as-a-service players like CoreWeave, we are beginning to see the emerging outlines of a new phase of competition in the public cloud driven by differentiated AI GPU clouds. In 2024, these new competition dynamics will take center stage as big tech seeks to outcompete each other in the race to realize artificial general intelligence. Nvidia will emerge as a giant competing on the same level as the ranks of Google, Microsoft and AWS. With its cutting-edge GPUs, I see Nvidia emerging as a very capable threat to big tech’s dominance in the public cloud space.”

Miroslav Klivansky, Global Practice Leader at Pure Storage

“In 2024, we will start to creep into GenAI’s trough of disillusionment (Gartner’s Hype Cycle defines this as a period when interest wanes when experiments and implementations fail to deliver) and will eventually industrialize the use of AI.  As we shift from the hype brought on by AI tools with a consumer-friendly UX, we’ll see companies better understand, invest, and apply AI-specific solutions to their business needs.”

“In 2024, we can expect AI to optimize energy efficiency across energy-hungry industries (e.g., manufacturing) as it will be integral in optimizing the process and money savings. Deploying LLMs for inference at scale will also lead to surprisingly high power bills, leading companies to review their data center efficiency strategies and ESG initiatives.”

“One of the industries most ripe for innovation with the help of AI is healthcare. Not only does it have the potential to improve diagnostics, but it also can improve medical devices and automate administrative tasks. The latter will likely be disrupted first because these systems are electronically managed and quickly automate tasks.”

The rate of AI innovation will slow down in the next year

“Over the last several years, AI innovation has been fueled by information sharing and open-source development. However, as companies increasingly invest in AI to give them a competitive edge and regulatory bodies seek to unpack the potential around AI’s broader impact, companies will likely be more aggressive when it comes to protecting their IP.”

Kurt Markley, Managing Director, Americas at Apricorn

Cyber Resilience

“The rapid growth of AI is helping bad actors more quickly create and deploy ransomware tools across a host of industries. It’s been reported that generative AI has helped to double ransomware attacks against industries such as healthcare, municipalities and education between August 2022 and July 2023. Also concerning is the rate at which organizations choose to pay a ransom in order to secure their data. One research report shows that nearly half of respondents have a security policy in place to pay a ransom, with 45% admitting that bad actors still exposed their data even after paying the ransom.

Ransomware isn’t a threat; in many instances it’s an inevitability. No data is too low-value and no organization is too small. The alarmingly high rate of paying a ransom and still having data exposed means that IT leaders have to take back control and put practices in place to protect their data and save their capital budget. It means that IT leaders can’t afford to slack off regarding cyber resilience. 

While almost all IT leaders say they factor in data backups as part of their cyber security strategies, research we conducted earlier this year found that only one in four follow a best practice called the 3-2-1 rule, in which they keep three copies of data on two different formats, one of which is stored offsite and encrypted. Furthermore, this same research found that more than half of respondents kept their backups for 120 days or less, far shorter than the average 287 days it takes to detect a breach.

The likelihood that AI-driven ransomware will impact far-higher numbers of organizations, it will be more important than ever in 2024 that organizations have a strong cyber resiliency plan in place that relies on two things: encryption of data and storage of it for an appropriate amount of time. IT leaders need to embrace the 3-2-1 rule and must encrypt their own data before bad actors steal it and encrypt it against them.”

Data Management Within Security Policy

“Data is no longer a byproduct of what an organization’s users create; it is the most valuable asset organizations have. Businesses, agencies and organizations have invested billions of dollars over the past decade to move their data assets to the cloud; the demand is so high that Gartner expects that public-cloud end user spending will reach $600B this year. These organizations made the move to the cloud, at least in part, because of a perception that the cloud was more secure than traditional on-prem options.

It’s estimated that 30 percent of cloud data assets contain sensitive information. All that data makes the cloud a juicy target and we expect that 2024 will continue to show that bad actors are cunning, clever and hard-working when it comes to pursuing data. The industry has seen triple the number of hacking groups attacking the cloud, with high-profile successes against VMware servers and the U.S. Pentagon taking place this year.

As IT teams spend more on moving and storing data in the cloud, organizations must spend the next 12 – 24 months auditing, categorizing and storing it accordingly. They need to gain deeper visibility into what data they have stored in the cloud, how data relates to each other, and if it is still meaningful to the operations of the organization. In doing so, they are advised to create specific security policies about how, where and for how long they store their data. These policies, when actively enforced, will help organizations better protect their most valuable asset – their data.”

Brian Land, VP of Global Sales Engineering at Lucidworks

Navigating the Privacy Terrain

“In 2024, brands are gearing up to face new challenges around privacy and ethics with the end of third-party cookies and the advent of new large language models (LLMs). This means they’ll be shaking things up in how they market and handle consumer data privacy. For example, they’ll have to find new methods for collecting user data and be more transparent about how they’re collecting that data. And when it comes to managing LLMs, they will adopt advanced encryption and secure data storage practices to safeguard user information. Rest assured, they’re working hard to get it right – making sure they follow the rules while still keeping consumers engaged and happy.”

Matt Watts, CTO at NetApp

There’s No Such Thing as Perfection

“If your company thinks the cloud will ease every IT woe your team is experiencing, you’ll want to think again. It won’t and it can’t. Migrations in hybrid multicloud environments strain both budgets and team resources and you’ll need to find ways to optimize operations both as you move to the cloud and every day thereafter. According to a recent report on data complexity, approximately 75 percent of global tech executives in the throes of cloud migration note they still have a sizable number of workloads remaining on-premises (between 30 percent and 80 percent). For most companies, maintaining an increasingly complex IT infrastructure will remain challenging as cost pressures mount alongside demands for greater innovation. In 2024, we’ll see companies abandon unrealistic ideas of creating the “perfect” cloud environment as they move toward an intelligent data infrastructure (IDI). IDI is the union of unified data storage with fully integrated data management that delivers both security and observability with a single pane of glass interface so you can store, control, and use data more easily no matter what applications, cloud services, or databases you’re using. Companies that choose IDI will experience greater agility in adapting to market conditions. With a more nimble infrastructure, IT can spend its time on innovation, skill building, and development that align with business priorities rather than simply maintaining their cloud environments.”

The Uncomfortable Truth: You’ve Already Had a Breach

“Today’s cyber threat landscape requires constant vigilance as you try to guess who, when, and how the next bad actor will attack. Whether an employee clicks on the wrong link, or an organized gang of cyber criminals are the culprit, you’ll need to have the right tools to quickly alert you of an attack so you can recover quickly. And, while preventing attacks is always the goal, the ability to keep bad actors out indefinitely is now a statistical anomaly. In fact, it’s predicted that by 2031 ransomware attacks will occur every 2 seconds at a cost of $265 billion each year. Because of this, 87 percent of C-suite and board-level executives see protecting themselves from ransomware as a high, or top, priority. And stolen data isn’t your biggest concern after an attack. It’s the lost productivity and business continuity as systems are repaired and data restored to get your business up and running again. In 2024, we’ll see more investment in IT security that ensures systems are secure by design and keep business to a minimum when there is an attack. Security infrastructures that include immutable data backups will add to peace of mind and mitigate downtime when cyber incidents are investigated.”

James Beecham, Founder and CEO at ALTR

While AI and LLMs continue to increase in popularity, so will the potential danger

“With the rapid rise of AI and LLMs in 2023, the business landscape has undergone a profound transformation, marked by innovation and efficiency. But this quick ascent has also given rise to concerns about the utilization and the safeguarding of sensitive data. Unfortunately, early indications reveal that the data security problem will only intensify next year. When prompted effectively, LLMs are adept at extracting valuable insight from training data, but this poses a unique set of challenges that require modern technical solutions. As the use of AI and LLMs continues to grow in 2024, it will be essential to balance the potential benefits with the need to mitigate risks and ensure responsible use. 

Without stringent data protection over the data that AI has access to, there is a heightened risk of data breaches that can result in financial losses, regulatory fines, and severe damage to the organization’s reputation. There is also a dangerous risk of insider threats within organizations, where trusted personnel can exploit AI and LLM tools for unauthorized data sharing whether it was done maliciously or not, potentially resulting in intellectual property theft, corporate espionage, and damage to an organization’s reputation.  

In the coming year, organizations will combat these challenges by implementing comprehensive data governance frameworks, including, data classification, access controls, anonymization, frequent audits and monitoring, regulatory compliance, and consistent employee training. Also, SaaS-based data governance and data security solutions will play a critical role in keeping data protected, as it enables organizations to fit them into their existing framework without roadblocks.”

With increased data sharing, comes increased risk

“Two things will drive an increased need for governance and security in 2024. First, the need to share sensitive data outside of traditional on-premise systems means that businesses need increased real-time auditing and protection. It’s no surprise that sharing sensitive data outside the traditional four walls creates additional risks that need to be mitigated, so next year, businesses need – and want – to ensure that they have the right governance policies in place to protect it. 

The other issue is that new data sets are starting to move to the cloud and need to be shared. The cloud is an increasingly popular platform for this, as it provides a highly scalable and cost-effective way to store and share data. However, as data moves to the cloud, businesses need to ensure that they have the right security policies in place to protect data, and that these policies are being followed. This includes ensuring that data is encrypted both at rest and in transit, and that the right access controls are in place to ensure that only authorized users can access the data. 

In 2024, to reduce these security risks, businesses will make even more of an effort to protect their data no matter where it resides.”

Rodman Ramezanian, Global Cloud Threat Lead at Skyhigh Security

Data Security and Privacy Concerns

“Organizations are increasingly concerned about the security and privacy of their data in the cloud. On-premises infrastructures tend to give organizations more control over their data.”

Andrew Hollister, CISO & VP Labs R&D at LogRhythm

Generative AI adoption will lead to major confidential data risks

“The cybersecurity landscape will confront a similar challenge with generative AI as it did previously with cloud computing. Just as there was initially a lack of understanding regarding the shared responsibility model associated with cloud computing, we find ourselves in a situation where gen AI adoption lacks clarity. Many are uncertain about how to effectively leverage gen AI, where its true value lies, and when and where it should not be employed. This predicament is likely to result in a significant risk of confidential information breaches through gen AI platforms.”

Angel Vina, CEO & Founder at Denodo

Organizations Will Need to Manage Cloud Costs More Effectively

“As businesses continue to shift data operations to the cloud, they face a significant hurdle: the relentless, unsustainable escalation of cloud data expenses. For the year ahead, the mandate is not just to rein in these rising costs but to do so while maintaining high-quality service and competitive performance. Surging cloud hosting and data management costs are preventing companies from effectively forecasting and budgeting, and the previously reliable costs of on-premises data storage have become overshadowed by the volatile pricing structures of the cloud.

Addressing this financial strain requires businesses to thoroughly analyze cloud expenses and seek efficiencies without sacrificing performance. This involves a detailed examination of data usage patterns, pinpointing areas of inefficiency, and a consideration for more cost-effective storage options. To manage cloud data costs effectively, firms need to focus on the compute consumed by queries and the associated data egress volumes, tabulating the usage of datasets, and optimizing storage solutions. These efforts are enhanced by adopting financial operations (FinOps) principles, which blend financial accountability with the cloud’s flexible spending model.

By regularly monitoring expenditures, forecasting costs, and implementing financial best practices in cloud management, organizations can balance cost savings and operational efficacy, ensuring that their data strategies are economically and functionally robust. In 2024, we will see a significant rise in the use of FinOps dashboards to better manage cloud data charges.”

Kevin Keaton, CIO/CISO at Red Cell Partners

Shifting Cyber Regulations Will Change the Status Quo

“The new SEC rules on cyber that go active in December for public companies are and will continue to cause significant changes in how boards operate with regards to cyber risks – and I expect that navigating these rules will be the biggest cybersecurity challenge businesses will face in 2024.”

Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat

Triple play of cyber resiliency, detection, and recovery to create an overall corporate cybersecurity strategy 

“The convergence of cyber resilience, detection, and recovery on a single storage platform is fueling a trend for 2024 around higher levels of cybersecurity for enterprise storage. Reliance solely on backup is no longer enough to secure storage systems. Primary storage has become a main target of cybercriminals for the most insidious and hard-to-detect ransomware and malware attacks that wreak costly havoc on enterprises. Combining resilience (the ability to instill defensive security measures to repel attacks), detection (the ability to know when data is corrupted and whether a known good copy of data is free of ransomware or malware), and recovery (the ability to bounce back) from cyberattacks is the key to hardening storage infrastructure.

This trend to better secure storage systems is highly important because of the continued exponential increase in cyberattacks against enterprises of all types and in all industries.  Cybercrime is predicted to grow from $8 trillion worldwide in 2023 to more than $10 trillion in 2025. Cybercriminals attempted nearly 500 million ransomware attacks last year, marking the second-highest year ever recorded for ransomware attacks globally, and in the 2023 Fortune CEO survey of “Threats” to their companies, CEOs named cybersecurity their #2 concern. Ransomware attacks also represented 12 percent of breaches of critical infrastructure in the last year.

The convergence of cyber resilience, detection, and recovery on an integrated storage platform is an advancement over the past, commonly-used approach of disparate tools and technologies trying to combat cyberattacks in silos. Improving the security defenses of cyber storage for enterprises eliminates the vulnerabilities of the silos. It makes the cyber capabilities more air-tight and ensures a rapid recovery of data within minutes to thwart cybercriminals, nullifying ransom demands and preventing (or minimizing) any downtime or damage to the business. Ignoring this trend in 2024 could greatly harm an enterprise, especially one that doesn’t even know cybercriminals are lurking in their data infrastructure, no matter how good their other cybersecurity defenses are.”

Stacy Hayes, Co-Founder and EVP at Assured Data Protection

More channel players to use specialists for managed services 

“The managed services model will become increasingly attractive to traditional VARs in 2024, especially with more and more businesses looking to buy cloud and IT services on a usage basis. But making the transition from a traditional VAR to a provider of managed services is easier said than done. It’s not that VARs aren’t capable of diversifying, far from it, it’s just that the switch requires a fundamental shift in the way VARs do business and that isn’t something you can just change overnight. These large organizations are not built for this new world model. The in-house build and integration of new technology and go-to-market models takes too long and is too expensive to implement. VARs simply don’t have the people, the flexibility or the know how. With the economic headwinds as they are, Opex is king and no-one has the Capex or the appetite for big in-house builds. 

It is becoming increasingly difficult for VARs to provide a large portfolio of products and services to the standards customers demand. The speed the market moves, the reliance on data, all add to greater demands from customers. It is evident channel businesses are struggling to deliver what their customers want, whether it be on-premises or in the cloud. It is a common topic and one I believe means VARs need to clearly understand what they can deliver themselves, and what they need to outsource. Outsourcing, white labelling, is a great way to deliver a high quality and diverse portfolio to customers. 

MSPs that have the know-how to use utility based models effectively, that can execute immediately, have experts in the space and deliver services tailored for the vendor, customer, end user will be the partners of choice for VARs in 2024.” 

Brian Dutton, Director, US Sales and Client Services at Assured Data Protection

More businesses to spend upfront for managed services to beat inflation 

“Businesses are becoming more cost-conscious as prices for cloud and SaaS services keep rising in line with inflation. Every time the large vendors and hyperscalers pass on costs to the customer, company CFOs and finance directors find themselves asking IT the question, ‘where can we cut costs?’ This is creating a dilemma for IT teams, who are left wondering how do they keep the lights on and execute new digital and cloud strategies, on a smaller budget? Which is why so many have switched to an OPEX model that covers core capabilities, including DR and backup, based on a consumption model that is paid for in monthly installments. It has allowed them to cut CAPEX, operate on a per TB model as opposed to wasting valuable data center resources, and focus their efforts on business priorities. 

The impact and cost savings are tangible, but it’s also thrown a lifeline to SMBs and government organizations that simply don’t have the budget or infrastructure to support investment in new DR and backup solutions. The managed service option has become the preferred choice for large enterprises that have to prioritize transformation projects, and SMEs, local schools and municipalities with budget limitations. We expect more businesses to adopt the utility-based model that managed service providers offer for cloud-based data management. It lightens the load on teams, while reducing risk and guaranteeing uptime and business continuity in the event of a disaster, data breach or ransomware attack. Another byproduct of this trend we’ve experienced is companies prepared to pay for services upfront, locking costs in for up to 6-12 months, or longer, to protect themselves against inflation. This makes financial sense, especially if you’re cash rich now and want to ensure your data is protected over the long term when market volatility can affect prices elsewhere. We expect this to become the norm next year and the foreseeable future.” 

Andrew Eva, Director, CIO at Assured Data Protection

Scope three emissions compliance set to drive uptake of disaster recovery managed services 

“Sustainability is an issue that impacts every part of the economy and increasingly, the technology sector is being held to account for its carbon emissions. Until recently, organizations have mostly had to concern themselves with two key emission calcifications: scope one – emissions the organization is directly responsible for, and scope two – indirect emissions, such as electricity. Now though, we’re seeing the impact of scope three emissions being felt. That is, all other emissions associated with an organization’s activities, including its supply chain. While scope three emissions aren’t yet legally enforceable, they are being widely adopted by large organizations, as legislation is inevitable and there’s a widespread desire to get ahead of the issue. We’re now seeing their impact filter down to smaller organizations.  

This is an issue for the DR sector and organizations that are leaders in sustainability – they are recognizing the challenge and the value of outsourcing this function to an MSP. By eliminating the need for data backup via a second site, which are costly to operate, don’t always utilize the latest power efficient hardware, and are responsible for significant carbon emissions, ESG compliance is a lot more manageable. There’s also recognition that this isn’t simply offloading the problem because MSP DR solutions achieve economies of scale by servicing multiple organizations via a shared facility, making them carbon-efficient for customers. Given the rate at which scope three is permeating, we expect to see more organizations adopt outsourced DR services. Both existing and future and existing business for MSPs depends on helping customers and partners achieve ESG compliance.”

Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat

Freeing up money from storage for AI and other critical IT projects 

“Dramatically reducing the costs of enterprise storage frees up IT budget to fund other significant new projects, such as AI projects, cybersecurity-related projects, or other strategic activities. This trend for 2024 will play a pivotal role in enterprises where there will be pressure to accelerate AI projects for the next stage of digital transformation, as well as to improve cybersecurity against more sophisticated AI-driven cyberattacks. With IT budgets projected by Gartner to grow by 8 percent in 2024, funding for these new projects will need to come from somewhere.

A smart approach to shifting IT spending internally that is taking hold is to remove costs from storage, while simultaneously improving storage. It sounds like a paradox at first sight, but the trend in 2024 will be to take advantage of three key factors that make this “paradox” an actual reality: (1) storage consolidation onto a single, scalable high availability and high performance platform, (2) autonomous automation, and (3) pay-as-you-go, flexible consumption models for hybrid cloud (private cloud and public cloud) implementations of storage. 

Storage consolidation, for example, replaces 20 storage arrays with one or two storage arrays that can scale into the multi-petabyte range with 100% availability guaranteed. Having fewer arrays immediately lowers costs in terms of IT resource and storage management, power, cooling, and space. This cost savings can be used for critical IT projects. Autonomous automation simplifies storage, intelligently automating processes and how to handle applications and workloads. Virtually no human intervention is needed. The storage systems run themselves, enabling a set-it-and-forget-it mode of operations. IT staff can focus on more value-adding activities and building AI capabilities into the infrastructure and across the enterprise. Leveraging flexible consumption models to pay for storage, as needed and as efficiently as possible, lowers CAPEX and OPEX, freeing up money for these other IT projects. An extension of this trend is also to invest in enterprise storage solutions that deliver an ROI in one year or less, optimizing the budget.”

The blossoming of green storage 

“Having more storage capacity in the same form-factor and having fewer storage arrays have become part of an ongoing trend to make enterprise storage, along with data centers in general, more environmental-friendly. Fewer arrays mean less carbon footprint, less to cool with the use of coolants, and less to recycle, translating into a much lower impact on the environment. Furthermore, consolidating multiple arrays into a single storage platform means the use of less energy, fitting a strategy to advance sustainability. Storage upgrades also bring energy savings, which also translates into cost savings, in light of the rising costs of energy this year. Consolidation also means much improved, more efficient utilization of space.

With the higher cost of energy, the need to reduce floorspace costs, the drive to lower carbon emissions, and the desire to reduce the impact of recycling of storage arrays on the environment, this trend will see in the new year an increase of audits of enterprise storage infrastructure and more intense identification of inefficiencies and waste in the storage estate.

The blossoming of green storage will be demonstrated in 2024 by reduced energy consumed to power storage systems, while still protecting data. We’ll see bigger capacity systems being installed that take up less space than traditional arrays. Software-defined storage increases storage utilization and reduces overprovisioning of storage. Also, part of green storage will be managing data as part of a data lifecycle strategy for more agility and better compliance with sustainability standards.

As part of broader green IT initiatives, storage will come under greater scrutiny in 2024 to boost efficiency and conservation. Enterprises will increasingly turn to AI for the capabilities to optimize storage capacity and streamline management, resulting in more efficiency. Gartner predicts that by 2025 half of all data centers will deploy AI/ML to increase efficiency by up to 30%. AI will also be used to optimize cooling. More enterprises that use water-based cooling systems to cool their data centers where storage systems reside will be compelled to get on a path to become “water positive,” replenishing more water than they consume. Green IT is changing the way storage administrators need to think about the future of enterprise storage.”

Seamless hybrid cloud integration

“The shift to hybrid cloud in the enterprise has been ongoing for years, as enterprises figured out that a balanced approach to leveraging the public cloud and maximizing on-premises private cloud data infrastructure makes the most business sense. But what is new about this trend is how dominant the hybrid cloud has become for enterprise storage. New capabilities have made it extremely easy for enterprises to manage on-prem private cloud storage and the public cloud storage as one, integrated, software-defined infrastructure, as if the public cloud is just another “array” identified in the software’s user interface. Advancements in the past year to make managing hybrid cloud storage even simpler has unlocked the full-scale embracing of this approach to storage, especially for large enterprises.

Hybrid cloud has also become easier to scale. If a large enterprise needs to expand capacity quickly because of an unexpected burst in data traffic, it can scale fast on a single, software-defined, multi-petabyte storage system that is on-prem. It can obtain a cloud-like experience, yet leveraging its own infrastructure, without any downtime or complexity. At the heart of why hybrid cloud is so strong, and so attractive, are cost and control. Enterprises can keep costs lower by using an on-prem storage system after storage consolidation of many arrays into one or two systems. They also don’t have to pay the hidden costs of moving data back and forth from the public cloud. They can use the public cloud for the use cases that are most appropriate, such as archived data, backup data, disaster recovery, or DevOps. Simultaneously, enterprises keep better control of their data by having it on-prem, ensuring compliance, especially with recent regulations about data governance and data privacy.”

Opening up the potential of containers in the hybrid cloud data center

“It’s estimated that approximately 90 percent of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production by the year 2026, according to Gartner analysts – up from 40 percent just two years ago. By 2026, it’s estimated that as much as 20% of all enterprise applications will run in containers, more than doubling the percentage from 2020. The adoption and expanded usage of containers are definitely on the upswing. This multi-year trend is gaining momentum for 2024 because of the increasing need for enterprises to innovate at a faster rate today than ever to meet evolving customer expectations. The point is that enterprises are becoming more digitally-focused in order to better compete.

Containers, which exemplify a cloud-native approach, provide a cost-efficient way to automate the deployment of modern applications – and do it at scale – while making them portable, environment-agnostic, and less resource-dependent to achieve cost savings. Consequently, the rate at which new applications are being developed is monumental. IDC reported that by the end of 2023, roughly 500 million new “logical applications” will have been created – a number that is the equivalent to the amount of applications developed over the past four decades in total. 

According to the latest available Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) survey, 44% of respondents are already using containers for nearly all applications and business segments and another 35 percent say containers are used for at least a few production applications.

More attention is being paid to thinking about the infrastructure – particularly the enterprise storage infrastructure – that supports containers. Storage is critical in the world of containers. The challenge with this trend is to pick the right enterprise storage, especially with enterprises globally needing to scale container environments into petabytes.

CSI is the standard for external primary storage and backup storage for container deployments, and it is becoming the default for Kubernetes storage environments and other container-run types. Applications, workloads, and environments are transforming around Kubernetes. It’s in your favor to work with an enterprise storage solutions provider that aligns to the CSI standards. The container world is moving so quickly and the versions of Kubernetes and the associated distributions get updated every three to six months. Kubernetes has emerged as the de facto standard for container orchestration.”

Skills gap in storage calls for an increase in automated storage

“A skills gap across the data center and, particularly, in enterprise storage has emerged, and the trend is that this gap is getting wider. Fewer IT professionals are choosing to specialize in storage yet capacity trends to grow in the enterprise exponentially. While it makes storage administrators more valuable at this time, an increasing number of enterprises are having trouble staffing the roles to manage traditional, legacy storage in support of applications, workloads and the entire data infrastructure. The shortage in qualified IT professionals creates a precarious situation for the future of many enterprises. Therefore, the trend in the enterprise space is to turn to AI-equipped autonomous automation of enterprise storage.

With autonomous automation going mainstream in the enterprise space, CIOs and IT leaders can take a “set it and forget it” approach to storage. They can reduce the risk of the skills gap jeopardizing their ability to have an always-on, reliable storage infrastructure. This approach, of course, requires a very simple user interface for the average IT professional to be able to manage the storage, whether to increase capacity, see insights into the performance of the storage system, or execute a rapid recovery from a cyberattack.  At the same time, use of autonomously automated storage frees up valuable IT headcount to be utilized in other areas of the datacenter and enterprise software environments.

The increase in cyberattacks has exposed the skills gap even more because enterprise storage has become the new frontier for pressure-testing the merging of cybersecurity and cyber resilience. If storage continues to be done in the traditional ways, enterprise will continue to be held ransom by bad actors unleashing ransomware. However, by automating cyber detection with ML-tuned algorithms, the skills gap gets plugged with new capabilities, making the normal IT person look like a “storage superstar.” The trend is toward self-directed, self-adjusting autonomous automation of enterprise storage to reduce the risks associated with any major skills gap. “

Redefining the user experience for enterprise storage

“For enterprise storage, user experience is no longer only about the graphical user interface (GUI).  While the GUI is still important and should be as easy to use as possible, the scope of user experience has broadened to include essential elements for today’s day and age: guaranteed service level agreements (SLAs), white glove service, and professional services. Enterprises are not only looking for a box on which to run their applications and workloads; they are increasingly looking for excellence in service and support to be built into their storage solution.

The trend is for enterprises to opt for the storage vendor that offers the best support, best SLAs, and best proactive professional services, yet at a low cost or for no charge. It redefines the expectations for user experience. Enterprises want to know they have an advocate within the storage provider who can lend their expertise to solve challenges for the customer. They want to know they can get L3 support direct on a moment’s notice. They want to have confidence in the integration capabilities of a professional services team.

They see this all as added value, and it has become either a dealmaker or a deal-breaker for many enterprises that are reevaluating their choice of storage solution vendor based on this criteria. User experience has been transformed into the total experience for the customer.”

Graham Russell, Market Intelligence Director at Own Company

More organizations will embrace the ongoing adoption of cloud and SaaS

“The SaaS revolution is turning industries into tech playgrounds: from healthcare to finance, the widespread embrace of Software as a Service applications has been a game-changer. But while SaaS may already seem ubiquitous, in reality many organizations have been slow to embrace it. 2024 is the year they will likely catch on. This shift will result in a broader market for SaaS providers, opening up new opportunities for growth and innovation. And with this increased adoption comes a greater need for data protection and cybersecurity measures. As organizations entrust mission-critical information to SaaS applications, the potential consequences of data loss and corruption become more significant.”

AI adoption will drive data breaches  

“As the adoption of AI continues to skyrocket, the risk of data breaches increases. The sophistication and reach of AI can inadvertently expose vulnerabilities in cybersecurity defences, making organizations more susceptible to malicious attacks and unauthorised access.

This inevitable intersection of AI and data breaches is set to redefine the data protection and cybersecurity landscape in the near future. The silver lining? It will propel a renewed and intensified focus on data security issues. With each headline-grabbing breach, businesses are becoming increasingly vigilant about the safety of their business data. Organizations will be more focused than ever on being compliant with – and demonstrating compliance with – regulatory standards.”

AI adoption will prompt greater focus on data hygiene

“As the adoption of AI continues its rapid ascent, the spotlight on data hygiene is poised to become even more intense. AI’s voracious appetite for high-quality, accurate data makes the concept of data cleanliness a critical factor in unleashing the true potential of AI applications.

In response to this need for impeccable data, a notable trend is the strategic use of backup files. Traditionally seen as a safety net for data recovery, backup files are now being leveraged as a valuable resource for training and refining AI and machine learning models. These files, enriched with historical and real-world data, serve as a goldmine for organizations looking to enhance the depth and breadth of their AI algorithms.

Incorporating backup files into AI and machine learning models allows organizations to simulate diverse scenarios, ensuring that the algorithms are robust and adaptable to real-world complexities. This approach not only optimises the performance of AI applications but also enhances the accuracy of predictions and decision-making processes.”

Organizations will pivot to a ‘platform of choice’ at the core of their tech stacks

“In 2024, organisations will strategically opt for a ‘platform of choice’ that will serve as the centre of their tech stack. This shift will help businesses move away from the fragmented approach of using multiple vendors and applications, towards a more streamlined and integrated tech ecosystem. As a result, organizations will go ‘all in’ with a platform and seek to use applications that are built on that platform to achieve greater efficiency and cost savings. This ‘platform of choice’ approach will go beyond a mere technological preference. As organizations prioritise applications built natively on the chosen platform they are hoping to also minimise the number of vendors and applications in their tech stacks, streamline their workflows and gain increased negotiating power and potentially lower costs associated with managing multiple solutions.”

Seth Batey, Data Protection Officer and Senior Managing Privacy Counsel at Fivetran

The pendulum for build versus buy is going to swing back to buy in 2024

“IT and data management will play a crucial part in bolstering ESG programs in 2024. While ESG and the criteria for each prong, including what investors or customers look for, may differ, strong retention policies support a company’s effort to satisfy the “E” prong, and strong privacy practices support the “S” prong.  Having strong IT and data management, including robust data classification and inventory is necessary to implement retention policies and other privacy safeguards that can be easy wins for an ESG program.”

Steve Stone, Head of Rubrik Zero Labs at Rubrik

The accelerating data explosion will force a security strategy rethink

“In 2024, organizations will face a stiffer challenge in securing data across a rapidly expanding and changing surface area. One way they can address it is to have the same visibility into SaaS and cloud data as they have in their on-premises environments–in particular with existing capabilities. And that will be a major cybersecurity focus for many organizations next year. More will recognize that the entire security construct has shifted – it’s no longer about protecting individual castles but rather an interconnected caravan.”

AI will dominate the cybersecurity conversation

“Both attackers and defenders will step up their use of AI. The bad guys will use it more to generate malware quickly, automate attacks, and strengthen the effectiveness of social engineering campaigns. The good guys will counter by incorporating machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, and other AI-based tools into their cybersecurity strategies.

I believe there is almost no scenario where AI-driven deepfakes won’t be part of the pending U.S. Presidential election amongst others. Even if the technology isn’t applied, its within the realm AI deepfakes will be blamed for gaffes or embarrassing imagery.

We’ll also hear more about the role AI can play in solving the persistent cybersecurity talent gap, with AI-powered systems taking over more and more of the routine operations in security operations centers. 

When it comes to cybersecurity in 2024, AI will be everywhere.”

CISOs (and others) will feel pressure from recent government actions

“In late October, the Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges against SolarWinds Corporation, which was targeted by a Russian-backed hacking group in one of the worst cyber-espionage incidents in U.S. history in 2019, and its chief information security officer, Timothy G. Brown. The complaint alleged that for more than two years, SolarWinds and Brown defrauded investors by overstating SolarWinds’ cybersecurity practices and understating or failing to disclose known risks. 

The charges came nearly six months after a judge sentenced Joseph Sullivan, the former CISO at Uber, to three years of probation and ordered him to pay a $50,000 fine after a jury found him guilty of two felonies. Sullivan had been charged with covering up a ransomware attack while Uber was under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission for earlier lapses in data protection.

On top of all that, new SEC rules on cybersecurity and disclosure of breaches were set to take effect Dec. 15. They require public and private companies to comply with numerous incident reporting and governance disclosure requirements.

All of this will have CISOs looking over their shoulder in 2024. As if defending their organizations from bad actors wasn’t challenging enough, now they will have to pay more attention to documenting absolutely everything.”

Brian Spanswick, CISO and CIO at Cohesity

IT leaders will increase their focus on cyber resilience to prepare for 2024’s top security threats

“As attackers and their tools become more sophisticated in the age of generative AI, the need for organizations to be resilient and ensure they can limit business disruption during a cyber event will become even more critical. In turn, organizations will be further investing in cybersecurity fundamentals such as strong asset management practices, system patching, and data encryption.

Quickly recovering core business processes with aggressive recovery time and recovery point objectives significantly minimizes the disruption of a ransomware attack and reduces the leverage the attacker has when demanding payment. This is especially key as organizations must be prepared for the event when, not if, a cyberattack occurs.”

As businesses move their workloads to the cloud, they will need to double down on data security by getting clear visibility of their attack surface – or risk misconfigurations and additional breaches

“Cloud transformation and hybridization are still in progress – and high-risk – for a number of organizations moving away from legacy systems. DSPM is a growing field to help customers manage this risk. In fact, Gartner has issued a report on this entitled “continuous threat exposure management.” Organizations need to fully understand the security implications of the new attack surface created by moving workloads from on-premises to the cloud.”

As more companies implement generative AI, they will face a challenge similar to shadow IT except shadow AI puts proprietary data in the public domain representing a much greater risk

“The challenge is not knowing what algorithms are being used, the data fueling them, and who is using those algorithms. CISOs and organizations will need to ensure transparency and control around the growing use of GenAI. Gartner has called this out in its focus on “AI trust, risk, and security management.”

In 2024, threat actors will continue demanding ransoms despite government agreements to not pay

“A group of nearly 50 countries recently pledged to no longer pay ransoms demanded as part of ransomware attacks. While this represents a diplomatic accomplishment this won’t blunt the frequency or sophistication of attacks on government infrastructure. Attacks are so cheap and easy to launch and the consequences so limited that attackers will continue to probe for weaknesses in an automated, programmatic fashion. Further, nation-state sponsored attackers will seek to sow chaos, rather than financial gain, from attacks.”

Dale Zabriskie, CISSP CCSK, Field CISO at Cohesity

Generative AI and security will come together in the worldwide fight against cybercrime and advanced-persistent threats

“Attackers will be leveraging AI tools to entice employees via social engineering to click and act recklessly, exploit zero-day vulnerabilities, and much more at a much faster rate. We can expect both adversaries and innovative defenders to leverage AI, and it will be a force multiplier in both of their efforts.”

Autonomous and Stateless AI Agents will be effective and efficient as nations and corporations fight off these ever-growing and evolving threats

“The technology world is evolving at a very rapid pace, and with this, the skills gap in emerging technologies is growing much wider than ever before. New tools need to be developed to act as a translation engine between native/natural language and engineering-speak or technical jargon.

To solve this, we are already starting to see the emerging trends of AI Agents – systems that act and reason with a set of predefined tools – to solve more complex situations than traditional RAG architectures. Agent and tool combinations will be leveraged to assist humans in more complex systems management and operational automation.”

Greg Statton, Office of the CTO – Data and AI at Cohesity

The importance of domain-specific bodies of data that are clean, relevant, as well as a means for providing responsible and governed access to that data for use in LLM-based applications, will be paramount

“2023 was the year of the LLM – the bigger the better. Now that all the cloud vendors have selected their LLM provider of choice (or built their own), the world will turn to the importance of domain-specific bodies of data that are clean, relevant, as well as a means for providing responsible and governed access to that data for use in LLM-based applications.

Data will be classified into two main camps:

• • Dynamic Data – this is machine generated data that is served via API or via event streams (think message bus data from live systems). This data is useful when looking at the current state of a thing/object/system/etc

  • Static Data – This is data that lives for a while in a current state. This will mostly be documents that are generated by other knowledge workers. Data that has a shelf life of weeks/months/years.”

Dr. Darren Williams, CEO and Founder at BlackFog

After a record-breaking 2023, we expect that ransomware will not ease anytime soon. Fundamentally, ransomware is becoming the main threat to all organizations, and insurance is no longer a viable option. Action needs to be taken. In 2024 we predict several new trends to take hold

“Ransomware gangs will look for new ways to force victims into paying. We have already seen gangs contact the SEC directly, reporting victims immediately to inflict maximum damage, forcing regulatory, reputational and class action liabilities. We expect this is just the beginning of several new tactics to maximize payouts.”

“Organizations will realize that their existing security is not making any impact on the new threat vectors and will finally start to focus on the core problem, “data security” and “data exfiltration.”

“More than 40 percent of existing data exfiltration goes to China and Russia. We expect other countries such as North Korea to play larger roles in 2024.”

“We expect to see major infrastructure applications become threat vectors for cyber gangs, similar to the way the MOVEit exploit was developed. Hiding in plain sight is going to be the new mantra for cyber gangs as they continue to avoid detection.”

“We expect to see ransomware disrupt major infrastructure through IoT devices and non-traditional platforms. These diverse systems often have limited security designed in and have significant exposure for organizations, particularly in the manufacturing industry.”

Monica Kumar, Chief Marketing Officer at Hitachi Vantara

Recognizing cloud as an operational model

“In 2024, we will see a significant shift in the perception of cloud computing. Gone are the days when all public cloud is good; we will now be looking at cloud as an ecosystem. Cloud will no longer be a fixed location–either on-prem or in the cloud–it’s an operating model that offers cloud principles like agility, self-service, cost-effectiveness, and scalability. This transformation from a location to an operational framework is becoming increasingly clear as more cloud providers begin to leverage solutions that bridge the gap between on-prem and cloud deployments.”

Hybrid cloud sustainability is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity 

“Business leaders have shown a bigger commitment to reducing their environmental footprint in recent years, with a focus on optimizing resource usage and enhancing the efficiency of data centers. A 2023 study from Hitachi Vantara found that nearly four in five IT leaders and C-level business executives have developed plans for achieving net zero carbon emissions, with 60 percent saying the creation of eco-friendly data centers is a top priority. As businesses rely more on hybrid cloud solutions for their IT needs, these technologies must contribute to a sustainable future. Therefore, in 2024, hybrid cloud sustainability will transition from a “nice to have” strategy to an absolute necessity due to its real implication on the business. 

The shift towards hybrid cloud sustainability will include a range of initiatives. Data center infrastructure and data management practices will be overhauled to reduce unnecessary resource consumption. This may consist of eliminating hot spots and excess energy usage, enhancing cooling systems, and properly removing electrical waste. Businesses will implement strategies to intelligently optimize workloads in their hybrid cloud setups for reduced energy consumption.

This transformation won’t just align with business goals; it will also drastically lower energy costs and streamline data management operations to improve efficiency, protect resources, and substantially curb environmental impact.”

Steve Santamaria, CEO at Folio Photonics

The Rise of Optical Storage in Active Archives

“In 2024, there will be a transformation in how we store and archive data with the emergence of optical storage and an alternative to active archiving systems. This trend will be driven by the growing demand for storage solutions that are not only long-lasting and secure but also energy-efficient. The invention, giving rise to a new generation of Optical storage, will gain traction, especially in sectors where stringent data retention rules are in place, thanks to its durability and resistance to environmental wear and tear. By incorporating state-of-the-art optical storage into active archiving, we’re looking at a viable, environmentally conscious alternative to conventional storage methods, bolstering data access and security. This movement is a testament to the increasing emphasis on both data preservation and environmental stewardship.”

Steve Leeper, VP of Product Marketing at Datadobi

“As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to weave into the fabric of modern business, the year 2024 is likely to witness a surge in the demand for enhanced data insight and mobility. Companies will need to gain insight into their data to strategically feed AI and machine learning platforms, ensuring the most valuable and relevant information is utilized for analysis. This granular data insight will become a cornerstone for businesses as they navigate the complexities of AI integration. At the same time, the mobility of data will emerge as a critical factor, with the need to efficiently transfer large and numerous datasets to AI systems for in-depth analysis and model refinement. The era of AI adoption will not just be about possessing vast amounts of data but about unlocking its true value through meticulous selection and agile movement.

 The trajectory of storage technology is also poised for a significant shift as the year 2024 approaches, with declining flash prices driving a broad-scale transition towards all-flash object storage systems. This shift is expected to result in superior system performance, catering adeptly to the voracious data appetites and rapid access demands of AI-driven operations. As flash storage becomes more financially accessible, its integration into object storage infrastructures is likely to become the norm, offering the swift performance that traditional HDD-based object storage and scalability that NAS systems lack. This evolution will be particularly beneficial for handling the large datasets integral to AI workloads, which necessitate rapid throughput and scalability. Consequently, a data mobility wave may be seen, with datasets and workloads being transferred from outdated and sluggish storage architectures to cutting-edge all-flash object storage solutions. Such a move is anticipated not just for its speed but for its ability to meet the expanding data and performance requisites of burgeoning AI initiatives.

Also importantly, in 2024, the landscape of data management will undergo a profound transformation as the relentless accumulation of data heightens the necessity for robust management solutions. According to Gartner’s projections, by 2027, it is expected that no less than 40% of organizations will have implemented data storage management solutions to classify, garner insights, and optimize their data assets, a significant leap from the 15% benchmark set in early 2023. This trend is likely to be propelled by the relentless expansion of data volumes, outpacing the rate at which companies can expand their IT workforce, thus elevating the indispensability of automation for data management at scale.

2024 is set to be a pivotal time for data management, with a shift towards API-centric architectures for meshed applications gaining traction. As customers increasingly demand that data management vendors offer API access to their functionalities, we are likely to see a mesh of interconnected applications seamlessly communicating with one another. Imagine ITSM (IT Service Management) and/or ITOM (IT Operations Management) software triggering actions in other applications via API calls in response to tickets — this interconnectedness will become commonplace. The trend towards API-first strategies will likely accelerate, driven by the desire to embed data management more integrally within the broader IT ecosystem. As a result, the development of self-service applications will flourish, enabling automated workflows and facilitating access to data management services without the need for manual oversight. This move towards a more integrated, automated IT environment is not just anticipated; it is imminent, reflecting a broader shift towards efficiency and interconnectivity within the technological landscape.

Finally, as we look toward 2024, we predict that an intensified focus on risk management will become a strategic imperative for companies worldwide.  Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) practices are anticipated to receive heightened attention as companies grapple with the complexities of managing access to data, aging data, orphaned data, and illegal/unwanted data, recognizing these as potential vulnerabilities. Moreover, immutable object storage and offline archival storage will continue to be essential tools in addressing the diverse risk management and data lifecycle needs within the market.”

Rohit Badlaney, CGM, Cloud Product and Industry Platforms at IBM

Businesses Must Close Skills Gaps to Ensure Hybrid Cloud Success in 2024

“In the past few years, hybrid cloud adoption has accelerated at an exponential rate with no signs of slowing down into 2024. However, businesses will face persistent challenges along their hybrid cloud journeys due to the widening skills gap in the tech workforce. In fact, a 2023 global survey from the IBM found more than half of global decision-makers say that cloud skills remain a challenge to widespread cloud adoption. In response to this challenge, 72 percent of organizations have created new positions to meet new and evolving demands for cloud skills. As organizations refine their multi- and hybrid cloud strategies, they must take a comprehensive approach that addresses skills gaps — creating opportunities to expand current workers’ skills and welcoming new skilled talent. “

Register for Insight Jam (free) to gain exclusive access to best practices resources, DEMO SLAM, leading enterprise tech experts, and more!

The post 87 Data Protection Predictions from 46 Experts for 2024 appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.

A schedule of events for Insight Jam LIVE on December 8 (formerly BUDR Insight Jam), the annual element of Solutions Review’s Insight Jam, an always-on community for enterprise technology end-users, experts, and solution providers.

What is Insight Jam?

Think of the Insight Jam as a continuous, ongoing, interactive tech event.

The Insight Jam will always be here when you need answers to the questions that matter to your organization and your career. We’ve partnered with the leading industry experts, thought leaders, and analysts to live-stream a never-ending collection of Roundtable Events, Breakout Sessions, and Expert Podcasts.

And Insight Jam is built on a community platform that powers unlimited discussions, posts, and polls that will bring you deeper into the enterprise technology conversation.

Your Insight Jam journey starts here and starts now. We encourage you to dive in, explore, share, and engage. Let’s challenge ideas, bring new perspectives and elevate our knowledge together.

Join the Fastest-Growing Enterprise Tech Software End-User Community

Solutions Review is the largest software buyer and practitioner community on the web. Our Universe of Influence reach is more than 7 million business and IT decision-makers, as well as C-suite and other top management professionals. Our readers primarily use us as an enterprise technology news source and trusted resource for solving some of their most complex problems.

Our collection of vendor-agnostic buyer’s resources helps buyers and practitioners during the research and discovery phase of a buying cycle. This critical stage of information gathering is where buyers narrow down the field of solution providers to a short-list they plan to engage. The mission of Solutions Review is to make it easier for buyers of business software to connect with the best providers.

Event Details: Insight Jam LIVE on December 8, 2023

11:00 AM: Executive Roundtable: The Convergence of Storage & Security: Key Implications featuring panel moderator Doron Youngerwood on LinkedIn and YouTube

12:00 PM: Executive Roundtable: Ransomware-Proofing Data Protection & Storage Environments featuring panel moderator Demetrius Malbrough, as well as Chris Marshall and Dr. Niraj Tolia on LinkedIn and YouTube

1:00 PM: Executive Roundtable: Best Practices for Governing Cloud Migration & Compliance featuring panel moderator David Loshin on LinkedIn and YouTube

2:00 PM: Executive Roundtable: Security, Compliance, and Privacy for Data Teams & Platforms (presented by Satori) featuring panel moderator Patricia Thaine on LinkedIn and YouTube

And that’s not all: Register for Insight Jam (free) to gain early access to all the exclusive 2024 enterprise tech predictions, best practices resources, and DEMO SLAM videos!

The post What to Expect at the 5th Annual Insight Jam LIVE on December 8 appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.

Solutions Review’s Spotlight with Rubrik is entitled: See How University of Reading Safeguards Their Data with Rubrik.

What is a Solutions Spotlight?

Solutions Review’s Solution Spotlights are exclusive webinar events for industry professionals across enterprise technology. Since its first virtual event in June 2020, Solutions Review has expanded its multimedia capabilities in response to the overwhelming demand for these kinds of events. Solutions Review’s current menu of online offerings includes the Demo Day, Solution Spotlight, best practices or case study webinars, and panel discussions. And the best part about the “Spotlight” series? They are free to attend!

Why You Should Attend

Solutions Review is one of the largest communities of IT executives, directors, and decision-makers across enterprise technology marketplaces. Every year over 10 million people come to Solutions Review’s collection of sites for the latest news, best practices, and insights into solving some of their most complex problems.

With the next Solutions Spotlight event, the team at Solutions Review has partnered with leading zero trust data security vendor Rubrik. The resource webinar will showcase how the immeasurable volumes of data in your Microsoft 365 environment are at risk. And now that Rubrik is partnered with Microsoft, its Microsoft 365 protection is even stronger.

• Salvatore Buccoliero, Sales Engineer at Rubrik: Salvatore is a Senior SAAS & Security Sales Engineer who enjoys working with customers to secure enterprise data. Salvatore gets motivated by working with disruptive products and fast-growing organizations and has experience since the 2000’s in launching new vendors and distributing products.
• Kevin Mortimer, Head of Operations at the University of Reading: Kevin, Head of Operations at University of Reading, has been a Rubrik customer since 2018. Kevin is a self-motivating, enthusiastic technologist at heart with a focus on service management. Innovative emerging technologies have always been a core value for infrastructure services.

About Rubrik

Rubrik is one of the most widely used enterprise data protection solutions in the world. Rubrik provides data protection and data management in hybrid IT environments. The platform is a scale-out-architecture-based data protection tool with cloud integration, live mount for Oracle databases, support for Office 365 backup, and support for SAP HANA backup. Rubrik‘s solution is recommended to buyers looking to protect highly virtualized on-prem environments and hybrid environments that leverage Microsoft Azure and AWS.

FAQ

• What: See How University of Reading Safeguards Their Data with Rubrik
• When: Thursday, July 20, 2023, at 12:00 PM Eastern Time
• Where: Zoom meeting (see registration page for more detail)

Register for Solutions Review’s Solution Spotlight with Rubrik FREE

The post What to Expect at Solutions Review’s Spotlight with Rubrik on July 20 appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.

Solutions Review’s Solution Spotlight with Zscaler and Banner Health is entitled: Learn How Banner Health Ensures Seamless Digital Experiences.

What is a Solution Spotlight?

Solutions Review’s Solution Spotlights are exclusive webinar events for industry professionals across enterprise technology. Since its first virtual event in June 2020, Solutions Review has expanded its multimedia capabilities in response to the overwhelming demand for these kinds of events. Solutions Review’s current menu of online offerings includes the Demo Day, Solution Spotlight, best practices or case study webinars, and panel discussions. And the best part about the “Spotlight” series? They are free to attend!

Why You Should Attend

Solutions Review is one of the largest communities of IT executives, directors, and decision-makers across enterprise technology marketplaces. Every year over 10 million people come to Solutions Review’s collection of sites for the latest news, best practices, and insights into solving some of their most complex problems.

With the next Solution Spotlight event, the team at Solutions Review has partnered with Zscaler and Banner Health to provide viewers with a unique webinar called Learn How Banner Health Ensures Seamless Digital Experiences.

Speakers

Krishnan Badrinarayanan, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Zscaler: Krishnan Badrinarayanan is a member of the Zscaler Digital Experience product team focused on helping IT teams deliver flawless digital experiences that power their businesses. Skilled in the SaaS and enterprise software space, he has over 18 years of experience in security and previously worked at Abnormal Security, Riverbed Technologies, and Dynatrace.

Koby Caputo,  Cybersecurity Engineer, Data Protection at Banner Health: Koby Caputo is a Cybersecurity Data Protection and Network Security Engineer for one of the largest US based Non-Profit Healthcare organizations with 65,000 + employees. He has experience with endpoint protection, proxy, firewall, email security, edge routing and switching, and Data Loss Prevention. Koby has facilitated 3 critical cybersecurity infrastructure rip and replace projects; the most recent being a complete transition from a legacy proxy to Zscaler ZIA and ZDX in less than 3 months.

About Zscaler

Zscaler is a cloud security company, with headquarters in San Jose, California. The company offers enterprise cloud security services. Their cloud native Zero Trust Exchange platform protects thousands of customers from cyberattacks and data loss by securely connecting users, devices, and applications in any location. Using zero trust principles, Zscaler helps IT move away from legacy network infrastructure to achieve modern workplace enablement, infrastructure modernization, and security transformation.

About Banner Health

Banner Health is one of the largest nonprofit healthcare systems in the country. The system owns and operates 30 acute-care hospitals and a number of other healthcare entities. Banner Health’s mission is to make health care easier, so life can be better. The organization provides emergency and hospital care, hospice, long-term/home care, outpatient surgery, labs, rehabilitation services, pharmacies, and primary care. In early 2018, it reported assets of $11.6 billion and revenues of $7.8 billion for the previous year.

FAQ

• What: Learn How Banner Health Ensures Seamless Digital Experiences
• When: Thursday, October 5, 2023 at 12:00 p.m. EST
• Where: Zoom meeting (see registration page for more detail)

Register for Solutions Review’s Solution Spotlight with Zscaler & Banner Health FREE

The post What to Expect at Solutions Review’s Spotlight Webinar with Zscaler on October 5th appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.

Solutions Review’s Expert Roundtable: Data Security, Trust, and Privacy for Analytics in the Cloud will feature a panel of experts from Snowflake, Satori, Monte Carlo, and moderator David Loshin.

What is the Expert Roundtable: Data Security, Trust, and Privacy for Analytics in the Cloud

Guarding against unauthorized access to sensitive corporate data is a priority, whether your organization is engaged in a cloud-oriented digital transformation effort, a data architecture modernization imitative, or is cloud-native from the get-go. Data privacy is the new hot commodity in the enterprise. Without instituting the right tools, processes, and practices, data protection becomes unscalable and ultimately unsustainable.

In this roundtable discussion, our panelists will share their experiences, discuss best practices for integrating technology solutions, and offer guidance for establishing a sustainable information risk program for ensuring the governed accessibility to sensitive corporate data. The 60-minute virtual event is moderated by an independent industry analyst, with a topic introduction hosted by Solutions Review – all broadcast live to an audience of registered attendees.

Join the Largest Data Protection Practitioner Community

Solutions Review Data Management and Analytics is the largest data software buyer and practitioner community on the web. Our Universe of Influence reach is more than 7 million business and IT decision-makers, as well as C-suite and other top management professionals. Our readers primarily use us as an enterprise technology news source and trusted resource for solving some of their most complex problems.

Our collection of vendor-agnostic buyer’s resources aims to help data management and analytics practitioners during the research and discovery phase of a buying cycle. This critical stage of information gathering is where buyers narrow down the field of solution providers to a short-list they plan to engage. The mission of Solutions Review is to make it easier for buyers of data management and analytics software to connect with the best providers.

Featured Panelists

Moderator: David Loshin, Knowledge Integrity, Inc.

Recognized worldwide as an information management thought leader, David has popularized best practices for business intelligence, data governance, performance computing, master data management, predictive analytics, and data quality. David is a monthly columnist for TechTarget and is a frequent presenter at The Data Warehousing Institute Conferences, Enterprise Data World, Data Governance and Information Quality, and web-based seminars.

Anoosh Saboori, Principle Product Manager at Snowflake

Anoosh leads product security at Snowflake. Prior to that, he was the lead group product manager for Google Cloud workload zero trust portfolio, a comprehensive and growing portfolio that includes infrastructure capabilities, platform products, and paid-for products to enable enterprises to achieve a zero trust architecture for workload-to-workload communications.

Yoav Cohen, CTO & Co-Founder at Satori

Yoav Cohen is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Satori Cyber. At Satori, Yoav is building the company’s technology vision and leading the research and engineering teams that build the Secure Data Access Cloud. Prior to founding Satori Cyber, Yoav was the Senior Vice President of Product Development for Imperva, which he joined as part of the acquisition of Incapsula, a Cloud-based web applications security and acceleration company, where he was the Vice President of Engineering.

Ryan Kelch, CTO & Head of Security & Compliance at Monte Carlo

Ryan Kelch is the Head of Security & Compliance of Monte Carlo, a data reliability company backed by Accel, Redpoint Ventures, GGV, ICONIQ Growth, and Salesforce Ventures. Prior to Monte Carlo, he led cloud and product security for Splunk Cloud, and before that he started the security practice at Climate Corp.

Featured Companies

Snowflake

Snowflake offers a popular cloud data warehouse. The solution loads and optimizes data from virtually any source, both structured and unstructured, including JSON, Avro, and XML. Snowflake features broad support for standard SQL, and users can do updates, deletes, analytical functions, transactions, and complex joins. The tool requires zero management and no infrastructure. The columnar database engine uses advanced optimizations to crunch data, process reports, and run analytics.

Satori

Satori offers data management and security product designed to enable secure data access to organizations of varying sizes. The product features continuous visibility and mapping for data flows and data stores, activity-based discovery and classification of data in real-time, data security through granular, field-level data access controls and anomaly detection, and compliance through monitoring and data privacy enforcement. Satori integrates into any cloud or hybrid environment without impacting existing user and application access.

Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo’s data observability platform utilizes best practices and principles of automatic application observability and applies them to data pipelines. This provides data engineers and analysts with visibility across all data pipelines and data products. Monte Carlo also offers machine learning that gives users a holistic view of an organization’s data health and reliability for important business use cases.

FAQ

What: Solutions Review’s Expert Roundtable: Data Security, Trust, and Privacy for Analytics in the Cloud

When: Thursday, June 8, 2023 at 12:00 PM Eastern

Where: Zoom meeting (see registration page for more detail)

Register for the Expert Roundtable FREE

The post What to Expect at Solutions Review’s Expert Roundtable: Data Security, Trust & Privacy for Cloud Analytics on June 8 appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.

Solutions Review’s Tim King compiled this roundup of 45 World Backup Day quotes from 32 experts for 2023, part of our ongoing coverage of the enterprise storage and data protection market.

As part of Solutions Review’s ongoing coverage of the enterprise storage, data protection, and backup and disaster recovery markets, lead editor Tim King offers this nearly 7,000-word resource. The World Backup Day quotes listed below come from the most on-trend executives in the industry, and its Solutions Review’s aim to connect enterprise technologists with Expert Insights, best practices, and buying resources to enhance your work life. World Backup Day quotes have been vetted for relevance and ability to add business value.

These are the most actionable of the hundreds of World Backup Day quotes we received, and Solutions Review editors believe these are actionable and may impact a number of verticals, regions, and organization sizes.

Note: World Backup Day quotes are listed in the order we received them.

World Backup Day Quotes: Expert Insights for 2023

Paul Speciale, CMO at Scality

“Uptime is everything in today’s 7×24 business cycle, where operations hinge on organizations’ ready access to data. Surging ransomware threats elevate the importance of data privacy and protection through capabilities such as encryption and data immutability in object storage – capabilities that protect sensitive data and enable teams to get back to business fast in the event of such an attack. This makes backup the key part of an overall data protection strategy and one of the most business-critical services that IT teams provide. To ensure protection against these threats, mandatory strategies now include offsite or air-gapped copies, which can be a headache to manage, or become obsolete over time.

World Backup Day in 2023 is more than an annual reminder to do the basics. It’s a siren call to invest in a scalable and immutable system that provides quick restores, such as those offered by modern object storage solutions. Organizations that implement a backup strategy with cyber resilience at the core can enable restores that are fast, predictable, reliable and cost-effective – at scale.  The value of effective backups goes beyond data protection, to delivering genuinely transformational benefits for the entire business.”

Jonathan Halstuch, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of RackTop Systems

If you are protecting data with backups, you also need to secure it

“Organizations have been using backups as a strategy to recover data and prevent total data loss in the instances of a critical system failure or natural disaster. However, their role and effectiveness in delivering protection against cyberattacks has been exaggerated.

Backups are an essential component of several functions in the NIST Cybersecurity Framework. Specifically, backups relate to the Recover function, which involves restoring any services that were compromised in a cybersecurity incident. However, backups fail to provide protection from data theft with no chance of recovery. Any data that has been identified as valuable and essential to the organization should also be protected with proactive security measures such as Cyberstorage that can actively defend both primary and backup copies from theft.”

Backups aren’t a protection from ransomware

“Many backup vendors have added ransomware protection to their marketing language which can give customers and prospects a false sense of security. Why? Their technology protects the backup copies of data from destruction or manipulation in order to ensure eventual recovery but does not defend the primary copies of data from theft or destruction.”

Ben McLaughlin, Vice President of Lyve Cloud at Seagate Technology

Amid an evolving malware landscape, data backup continues to be the best line of defense against cyber-criminals

“A rise in ransomware as a service and extortion tactics means that organizations need to be more vigilant than ever and ensure their data is backed up and protected. Organizations should consider solutions like immutable storage, which cannot be edited or deleted, and decentralized storage, which lowers the risk of a cyberattack because data is distributed, helping them stay ahead of emerging threats.”

Efficient data backup drives innovation

“Companies most adept at managing their multi-cloud storage are 5.3x more likely than their peers to beat revenue goals by 10 percent. As generative AI applications like chatbots become more pervasive, companies will train them on their troves of internal data, unlocking even more value from previously untapped information. To make the most of chatbots and AI innovation, organizations should develop comprehensive data classification strategies and adopt technology that seamlessly moves data where it can provide the most value.”

Data classification is essential to remain compliant as data regulations increase in complexity

“Various data categories (PII, healthcare, financial, etc.) are regulated differently based on their industry and location and require unique data storage solutions. As part of their backup strategy, organizations need a unified data classification system to ensure that data is stored securely and in compliance with regulations, to help avoid regulatory fines and long-term reputation damage.”

SaaS enterprise data risk

“Many enterprises have transitioned their critical workloads to the cloud. The result is that large sections of corporate datasets are now created by SaaS applications. Many SaaS vendors do not include backups as part of their service. Organizations should recognize the existence and importance of enterprise data created by their SaaS workloads and implement appropriate data backup and protection measures.”

Lisa Erickson, Head of Data Protection Product Management at Veritas

78 percent said they’re concerned that the governments and businesses that have their personal information will be victims of ransomware or other attacks targeting sensitive data (In a recent Veritas survey of 2,000 US consumers)

“Adding to their stress, nearly half (48 percent) also said they don’t trust these governments and businesses to adequately back up their digital information so it can be recovered after an attack. Consumer concern is high, and the threat landscape continues to evolve with faster and more complex threats targeting on-premises and multi-cloud environments. It’s more important than ever for organizations to make secure data backup from edge to core to cloud a top priority.”

Start the backup process with comprehensive data classification and implement deduplication

“IT departments can’t afford to save their data indiscriminately as they face tight budgets and scrutiny over cloud spend ROI — 94 percent of organizations globally already overspend on cloud. Organizations should implement comprehensive classification systems to understand the kinds of data they have and therefore where and how it should be stored and for how long. Implementing identification, categorization and retention policies will help organizations organize their data and ensure that the critical and sensitive data is retained appropriately. Also, they can reduce their attack surfaces by establishing policies, technologies and auditing that reduces their data footprint through methodologies like deduplication.”

Double down on backup at the edge

“Organizations often don’t apply the same level of protection to the edge as they do in the data center, often due to skills and staffing shortages. Each edge device needs to be protected and backed up and the resulting edge data needs to be assessed, categorized and protected accordingly.”

Your data isn’t inherently safer in the cloud

“As part of their standard service, most CSPs only provide an uptime guarantee of their service, not comprehensive cloud data protection with guarantees. In fact, many include a shared responsibility model in their terms and conditions that a customer’s data is their responsibility to protect. The same rules apply to your cloud data that apply to all your other data: you must assess, categorize, protect and recover it. Never just assume someone else is doing that for you. The easiest way to accomplish this is to ensure that the enterprise data protection capabilities you expect and use today can be extended to hybrid cloud and cloud native.”

Automation is key to secure and cost-effective backup and recovery

“Enterprises are dealing with an unprecedented quantity and variety of workloads and data that they need to manage. AI-based methodologies and technologies that automate provisioning, lifecycle optimization and smart usage of resources like storage are necessary to keep up with these challenges, and they free up IT staff to focus on more strategic and transformational activity.”

Steve Watt, SVP and CIO at Hyland

“The key in most cases [data protection, backups and disaster recovery] is having a program that includes a 360-degree view of all the systems you need to protect, a properly prioritized continuity recovery plan, and an effective testing and audit strategy. It’s also important to develop a strategic risk program and make smart decisions on the type of recovery scenarios you’re most likely to face.

Getting a copy of your data is often the easy part, but building an effective program to address all the other aspects of data continuity is where a lot of the work happens. Regarding precautions, I would advise in relation to test plans to always be wary of simulated recovery scenarios. It’s important to do full failover and recovery whenever possible so that you truly can understand the nuances you may face in a real situation. 

Ensure your business units understand the dependencies that exist on those cloud systems and how they interact with processes and on-premises infrastructure in the case of hybrid [cloud storage]. It’s also important that you have an accurate inventory and understanding of any secondary systems that functional groups use in their processes. Many times in testing, we have run into situations where you think all the right apps are being protected – only to find out a SaaS tool has been integrated into a process but not well documented. That is why it is so important to test your plans and recovery and make the business a large part of that effort to ensure something small doesn’t become an issue.“

Rob Price, Director, Field Security Office at Snow Software

“Banking collapse, volatile economies, pandemics and cybercrime don’t change the fundamentals – data is the lifeblood of every organization and needs to be protected as such. Companies need to adhere to the law, govern data accordingly and have a recovery plan in place. Backups represent the last line of defense for everything from fat fingers to state-sponsored attacks. The key, as ever, is to treat information assets according to their importance to your business and manage risk accordingly.”

Jason Konzak, SVP, Professional Services at Flexential

“Ransomware thieves are swarming the internet – and their success reflects the industry’s continued inability to implement appropriate preventative and recovery measures. Without proper backups and incident response plans, businesses are unable to recover data effectively and efficiently, putting long term business success on the line. In 2023, I urge leaders to make robust data protection a priority for their IT organizations.

Given IT admin work can quickly fall to the bottom of to-do lists, I suggest directly assigning responsibility to employees for maintaining and testing the backup strategy. On a daily basis, an assigned employee should manually review backup and DR job successes, and failures. Failed jobs need to be tracked as incidents and corrected so they do not become persistent gaps in protected data. Similarly, designated team members should test backups and DR solutions, document the results not only of success and failure, but also document the expected recovery time and recovery points (RTO and RPO). The results of these tests must be shared with organizational leadership so everyone can be on the same page about the ability of IT to protect critical data and keep business operations running.”

George Axberg III, VP, Data Protection Division at VAST Data

“Data protection operations has always focused on moving data via a backup quickly, while restores were seen as a secondary, but necessary chore. Instant Recovery is nothing new – restoring ten to twenty virtual machines (VMs) instantly has been supported for years. But with the massive inflection in data accumulation/sprawl over the last few years – how can organizations instantly restore thousands of VMs, unstructured file systems, and 20+ terabyte databases? Organizations today must be prepared not just for backup and recovery, but for instant access and instant operations at enterprise scale. To adapt and survive in today’s data intensive, AI-driven world, an organization’s business critical applications require the right infrastructure and restore capabilities to provide immediate access to their data in order to reinstitute the IT operations necessary to run their business and deliver value to customers.”

Kevin Cole, Global Director, Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise Company 

“World Backup Day is a timely reminder to be proactive about protecting your data and applications from disasters, ransomware, and other disruptions. It’s easier than ever to implement scalable software solutions to ensure you have multiple copies of your data, stored in multiple locations, and in multiple formats. Securing your data is just the start: once you have a data protection strategy in place, it’s critical to consider recovery of that data should any disruption, outage, or cyber-attack occur. Especially with ransomware, speed of recovery is the key: how quickly can you resume operations and do so without losing data nor paying the ransom? Rapid recovery with no downtime and no data loss helps businesses of all sizes achieve true resilience and bounce back no matter what comes along.”

Neil Jones, Director of Cybersecurity Evangelism, Egnyte

“World Backup Day reminds us why data protection should be prioritized by all organizations on an everyday basis. Data backups have become mission-critical as organizations struggle to manage the vast amounts of data they generate in today’s hybrid work environment while navigating rising cyberattack volume and rapidly-evolving data privacy regulations.

The most significant evolution I’ve seen over the past several years is that most companies can no longer view data backup strategy monolithically. Rather, they need to balance a mature Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) program with lighter, more nimble backup approaches such as snapshot recovery. Here’s why: In the event of a significant, just-in-time cyber-incident like a ransomware attack, users cannot remain productive without immediate access to their data, and even minutes or hours of data interruption can have a major impact on productivity.

On World Backup Day, and every day, organizations like yours should implement effective data protection strategies like reducing data sprawl, restricting users’ access to information on a ‘business need to know’ basis, and incorporating data backup into your incident response plan. It’s also important to encourage your employees to take proactive steps to back up their data, as data protection needs to be a way of life rather than waiting for potential crises to serve as teachable moments.”

Terry Storrar, Managing Director, Leaseweb UK

“The way organizations use and store data has changed drastically in the last few years; gone are the days of clunky external hard drives and floppy disks. Now, it’s all about the cloud. In fact, recent industry research found that the majority (66 percent) of respondents suspect that the industry will see the end of on-premises infrastructure over the next two years.

With this change in storage must come a change in protection. More emphasis needs to be placed on protecting mission critical data wherever it is located and ensuring business continuity. Thankfully, modern cloud backup solutions have the benefit of being suitable for businesses of any size. They allow for data backup from any server or device, anywhere with an internet connection. Cloud backup solutions are easy to manage, and their providers offer reliable, hands-on customer support.

However, not every cloud backup solution is created equal. Organizations need to ensure that they are choosing a trusted cloud hosting provider that offers comprehensive expertise, 24/7 support and robust disaster recovery solutions. From the data center providers’ point of view, they need to take every necessary precaution to ensure that customers’ data is available around the clock, along with comprehensive backup. This includes the availability of emergency backup services, such as batteries and generators, in case of power outages. Agreements should also be in place with energy suppliers for redundant energy connections that enter the data center from different locations, redundant internet connections, and an agreement with local authorities for evacuation work to reduce possible damage to any important cables. In the event of a disaster, it’s important to keep in mind that a proactive backup plan to ensure business continuity always has multiple moving parts to consider; having the right providers and products in place helps ensure these parts work in concert if disaster strikes.”

Andy Stone, CTO – Americas, Pure Storage

“As the rate and sophistication of cyberattacks accelerates even faster than the value of enterprise data, it’s clear that data recoverability has never been more important for business resiliency. In light of this, World Backup Day provides a welcome reminder for organizations to re-evaluate their security approach, and invest in the right mix of reliable technologies and effective processes to safeguard valuable application data in a constantly changing threat environment. Both CISOs and organizations alike have the opportunity to develop meaningful data protection and backup approaches that are embedded in their infrastructure and culture. With that said, it’s critical for today’s leaders to understand and recognize the need to move away from legacy backup solutions, and instead focus on building proactive resiliency architectures supported by modernized backup strategies in order to expedite data recovery and mitigate the full impact of a cyberattack. The bottom line – when it comes to data protection, proactivity and resiliency are key.”

Rick Vanover, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam

“Backup is only important when a company needs to recover data. This lesson gets learned again and again as the risk of not being able to recover data puts everything at risk. I’d challenge that organizations are generally now digitally transformed and the risk of not being able to recover data puts the entire organization in jeopardy with downtime, costs, loss of business reputation and more. This scenario would be incredibly unfortunate as one can’t recover what hasn’t been backed up. Organizations should prioritize data protection strategies to be complete in what they protect but also reliable in the ability to drive recovery when it is needed most.

Multi-modal behavior will be a trend moving forward – a ransomware threat that started with a phishing email, leveraged by a remote access implementation that was not fully secured, and then exploited a known (or unknown) vulnerability as part of an organization’s technology stack. Another trend with ransomware still exists on the people side of the equation with businesses that still don’t have a solid plan in place to address a ransomware response when it happens – because it will happen. A third trend with ransomware is actually encouraging – more ultra-resilient media types than ever. In the end, what we want data backup to do is get a business out of a problem. Ransomware will put a data backup strategy to the test and having a copy on an ultra-resilient media is the best way to get out of that problem. Ultra-resilient media types include technologies that are air-gapped, offline, immutable or require 4-eyes recovery (2 humans). There are more ultra-resilient media options than ever and advise businesses to implement the 3-2-1 Rule and refresh it with the 2 non-production copies to *both* be ultra-resilient media types.”

Dave Russell, VP of Enterprise Strategy at Veeam

“Unfortunately, we have all lost data, in our personal and professional lives. We’ve researched the causes for unplanned server outages from the last three years, and all of the things that we’ve worried about for decades, such as networking issues and accidental deletion, all remain, and now cybersecurity events have become the most common, and the most impactful cause of an outage. If there are no backups to recover from, a company risks loss of revenue and loss of brand and reputation. Our global industry data shows that backup is vital for recovering from a ransomware event, as on average, 39 percent of data is encrypted or destroyed. No organization, of any size, vertical, or geography has 2 out of 5 files, servers or applications that they can afford to completely lose.

Ransomware and cyberthreats are evolving. Unfortunately, as an industry, we are losing ground. Veeam’s unbiased, independent industry-wide research surveyed 4,200 organizations across the world, running a variety of backup solutions, with 85 percent reporting that they were hit by a ransomware attack. Only 15 percent indicated that they were not successfully attacked, which is down from 24 percent the previous year.  Not only are more of us getting attacked, but we’re also getting attacked more frequently.”

Michael Cade, Field CTO of Cloud Native at [kasten.io]Kasten by Veeam

“As with all platforms, the protection of data is critical to business. The key area of focus for me though is making people aware and to understand the importance of data backup when it comes to cloud and cloud native. As many businesses are in process of moving their workloads into the public cloud and consuming as a service, it’s important to note that this doesn’t remove the requirement for data management. The cloud providers are going to keep the infrastructure available and resilient, but the data is on you as a company. Now when we get further up the stack to Kubernetes and cloud native adoption, this is just another platform. So, all those data services (regardless of where they reside), if the data is important then backup is needed.

Ransomware is inevitable. In fact, that risk is only growing according to research. From a data services perspective, there is one particular area that are being targeted by those cyber criminals – gain access to a database exfiltrate customer data, sell that data and then encrypt. Imagine that happening to your business, which is not an if, but when. We are seeing more adoption of PaaS-based database services in the cloud as well as an increase of data services being deployed within Kubernetes. It is imperative that we secure and protect these workloads because an impact isn’t always a light touch when these bad actors strike. Having up front visibility of attacks and having an immutable copy of your data as the last line of defense is going to get you back up and running as a business versus closing the doors to your business.

In the Kubernetes space in, attacks around crypto mining is a trend potentially as the first wave where the attacker gains access to the cluster, plants their own mining application alongside workloads, and then leverages CPU cycles to mine cryptocurrency. These attacks are becoming more and more advanced. This may have been the extent of the attack before but now we are seeing exfiltration, encryption and deletion of data alongside the mining. This not only brings the disaster failure scenario to recover data but with a skills shortage around cloud native technologies, you need to make sure you have an easy button for recovering that data and moving swiftly without complexity and constraints.”

Maxime Arandel, IT & Security Director at CybelAngel

“Regarding data loss the golden rule is backup, backup, backup. Backup your critical data, encrypt it and store it safely, preferably in a separate environment. Perform restoration tests on your backups regularly, otherwise they are worth nothing. 

Regarding data theft, use all the traditional tools of IT security to make sure any initial access in your environment will be harder and only yields limited access. Enforce 2FA and organize phishing training for your employees. Apply separation of duties and least privilege. Encrypt everything that can be encrypted. Use SSO as much as you can, it’ll help manage security of your third party environments.

You also need to take a proactive approach to map your attack surface perimeter and identify threats before they are used against you. Vulnerabilities, outdated environments, shadow IT… will be used to gain initial access in your environment. 

Finally, have a crisis and incident management plan and do actually test it. It will help fight the stupor that sets in if your company is under attack.”

Carl D’Halluin, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Datadobi

“Failing to backup your data can have catastrophic consequences, as a single hardware failure, cyber-attack, or natural disaster can wipe out all your valuable information, leaving you with no way to recover it. This means that years of hard work can all be lost in an instant, with no chance of retrieval. Even the cost of losing just a portion of your important data can be immeasurable, with potential financial, legal, and reputational implications that can last for years.

Identifying the vital data that requires protection should be the first step in the process. But even if you know and can ‘describe’ what data must be protected, finding it has always been another matter – and you cannot backup what you cannot find. To effectively address this enormous and complicated undertaking, users should look for a data management solution that is agnostic to specific vendors and can manage a variety of unstructured data types, such as file and object data, regardless of whether they are stored on-premises, remotely, or in the cloud. The solution should be capable of evaluating and interpreting various data characteristics such as data size, format, creation date, type, level of complexity, access frequency, and other specific factors that are relevant to your organization. Subsequently, the solution should allow the user to organize the data into a structure that is most suitable for the organization’s particular needs and empower the user to take action based on the analyzed data. In this case, backup the necessary data to the appropriate environment(s). And, if necessary, the solution should enable the user to identify data that should be organized into a ‘golden copy’ and move that to a confidential, often air-gapped environment.

To sum it up… Don’t let the nightmare of data loss become your reality – always backup your data.”

Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i

“World Backup Day is an annual event that is intended to raise awareness of the importance of data backup and protection. It serves as a reminder for individuals and organizations to take proactive measures to safeguard critical data against unexpected incidents that can result in data loss, such as hardware or software failure, cyber-attacks, natural disasters, and human error. And, while the exact cost can vary depending on factors such as the size of the organization, the type and amount of data lost, the cause of the loss, and the duration of the downtime, according to various studies, it can cost organizations upwards of billions of dollars each year.

That’s why, for systems architects and IT executives alike, zero is the ultimate hero. And to achieve it, they are taking a multi-pronged approach to data protection. To achieve zero downtime, zero security holes, and zero wasted resources, they are also layering-on smart high availability (HA) clustering and software-defined perimeter (SDP) technology that enables them to securely connect and failover enterprise applications — from anywhere, to anywhere, anytime.

On World Backup day and all year long, it is critical to remember that businesses that invest in data protection are better equipped to navigate unexpected data loss events, maintain regulatory compliance, and protect their critical assets and reputation. Bottom-line, investing in data protection is not just smart, it’s essential for business success.”

Steven Santamaria, CEO, Folio Photonics

“The world’s most valuable resource is data, and it is of utmost importance to properly store, protect, and preserve this resource. The safekeeping of data is essential because it represents the foundation upon which many modern businesses are built, and its loss can have far-reaching consequences for organizations and individuals alike. As such, ensuring the safety and longevity of data should be a top priority for any entity that relies on this precious resource.

On World Backup Day, we are reminded of this, and the criticality of backup as one of the key safety nets against data loss, whether it’s due to technology failures, cyber-attacks, or human error.

Today, I would offer that the most effective data protection strategy should also incorporate a data storage platform that can be securely archived in an off-site location, with the added benefit of being taken off-line and air-gapped for even greater security. This means that the storage platform is physically separated from the main network and disconnected from the internet, making it highly resistant to cyber-attacks and other forms of data breaches. In essence, a well-designed data protection strategy should prioritize both physical and digital security to safeguard critical data and ensure business continuity.”

Ken Barth, CEO of Catalogic Software

“Backup solutions continue to play a significant role in ensuring business continuity, particularly in the event of a ransomware attack or a natural disaster. World Backup Day reminds us that it’s only a matter of time when we will need to recover our systems and data from backups. To minimize downtime and the effort it takes to recover compromised systems and data, IT professionals need to have the tool to detect suspicious activity and potential ransomware data compromise, and the tools to quickly recover.

Pre-backup is where the focus has moved to, which includes tools for monitoring that the systems and data being backed up are not compromised by ransomware, to help ensure that they can be restored from backups. Integrating pre-backup monitoring with your backup solution also provides the ability to identify and restore only affected data and systems.

Take the next step to provide your backup team with the tools to be proactive in their cyber security stance, and you will now have a holistic, unified backup and disaster recovery strategy with immutable and air-gapped copies of data, and granular and guided recovery plans that can be easily executed in the event of a disaster.”

Joe Morgan, VP of Cloud at Virtuozzo

“Backups are no longer just a copy of some data, but part of the full data lifecycle. You have to ensure your data is end-to-end protected, because if you’re recovering data that has been compromised, it’s not good. That’s why technology like backup scanning is becoming more and more important, and why backup is now part of the whole cyber-security effort. By making sure data is end-to-end protected, and not just backed up, you can be back up and running quickly if disaster strikes – instead of having to rebuild everything from scratch.”

Aron Brand, CTO of CTERA

“World Backup Day is a reminder of the importance of backing up data, but let’s face it, the traditional backup and restore approach is outdated and prone to errors. Ransomware attacks have shown us the weaknesses in this approach, and the road to recovery can be complex and time-consuming. It’s time for a change.

The future of data storage lies in intelligent storage systems that proactively safeguard data from ransomware, continuously protect data as it changes, and offer instant recovery solutions. This means organizations can quickly assess the scope of lost or damaged data and easily remediate it, without lengthy restore sessions or downtime. I believe we should say goodbye to the old backup approach and embrace the dawn of a new era. Proactive disaster protection is the best way to mitigate disaster, and next-generation storage solutions that utilize artificial intelligence and data-based insights will be the key to keeping organizations up and running in the face of disaster. It’s time to deliver storage solutions that support the requirements of the modern enterprise.”

Ameer Karim EVP & GM, Unified Monitoring & Management at ConnectWise

“World Backup Day is an essential reminder of the critical role that data backups play in ensuring business continuity and the optimal productivity critical to the success of every small business. And though cyber-attacks and breaches have been getting more attention, data corruption and data loss from human error have plagued the industry long before cyber threats were on our radars.

As many workloads shift to the cloud, many believe that backup is no longer needed, not realizing that the SaaS providers often don’t backup user data for their end-users. Only 25-30 percent of organizations rely on third-party SaaS Backup solutions to back up their data, leaving their mission-critical applications, such as Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce.com, and Azure Active Directory, unprotected. Data loss due to accidental deletions, malicious insiders, and cyber-attacks can easily cost small businesses thousands of dollars in lost business and productivity.

So, on this World Backup Day, it’s important to prioritize backups as not only a best practice but also a lifesaver for your SaaS solutions that assist in maintaining company operations. By regularly backing up data and partnering with trusted MSPs, SMBs can prepare their businesses for unforeseen events.”

Glenn Gray, Director of Product Marketing at Auvik

“Backing up data and the network is not the most exciting task, but it is critical for business continuity, productivity and profitability of a company. Changes and updates to network configurations happen regularly, but documentation and backups of those configurations typically lags behind, leaving organizations vulnerable to network outages. Our recent report found 41.5 percent of IT teams are only updating network documentation monthly or less often, despite 53% reporting that configuration changes are happening daily or weekly. What’s more, 45 percent of IT teams do not fully know the configuration of their networks.

These gaps make it far more challenging for IT teams and network managers to pinpoint and correct issues when the network goes down, and in these moments, speed is crucial. According to the information Technology Industry Council, one hour of server downtime costs most small and mid-sized companies $300,000, and can cost larger organizations more than $5 million. World Backup Day is a good reminder for IT teams and network managers to ensure that they have policies and capabilities in place to keep network configuration changes and documentation fully up to date, routinely backup network configurations and maintain a complete network map. These tasks are mundane but incredibly important for ensuring business continuity and recovery in the event of a cyber-attack or other network disruption.”

Anneka Gupta, Chief Product Officer of Rubrik

“If your organization is relying solely on legacy backup solutions to recover from a cyber incident, you’re exposing your critical apps and data to significant risk. The harsh reality is: no industry, organization, or government is immune. In fact, according to the Rubrik Zero Labs’ State of Data Security report findings, 98 percent of security and IT leaders dealt with at least one cyber-attack in the last year. While many organizations have backup solutions in place, this legacy technology alone is not enough to effectively defend against today’s sophisticated cyber threat landscape. A more holistic approach is needed that combines backup & recovery with data security to provide cyber resiliency.” 

“World Backup Day is a perfect day to remember that legacy backup solutions can be effective when it comes to recovering from events like natural disasters, they’re not purpose-built to secure your data from cyber incidents, which can result in catastrophic data loss. There are three key reasons why relying on legacy backup solutions alone can pose a threat to the security of your organization:

1. Legacy backups are vulnerable to cyber-attacks. All too often, legacy backups have open storage protocols, which can expose data to unauthorized access and manipulation by hackers. Without proper authentication and access controls, cybercriminals can exploit vulnerabilities in these systems and compromise an organization.
2. Legacy backups fail to provide critical insights or visibility into what data is at risk or what’s been affected when you’ve been attacked. The inability to effectively monitor your data puts you in a highly vulnerable position and significantly hinders your ability to quickly and accurately assess risks and remediate threats.
3. Legacy backups don’t allow you to simulate and test your recovery. This is particularly concerning when it comes to confidence in the ability to recover your critical data and systems – which is critical in the face of a cyberattack when time is of the essence. These tools also don’t empower you to quickly restore data to a specific point in time and don’t provide an easy way to ensure that the restored data is free of malware. 

These reasons further exemplify why a strong data security posture is needed to detect, respond to, and quickly recover from security breaches with confidence and speed.”

Stephen Manley, CTO, Druva

“Backup isn’t security… but security is part of your life now. You need to learn how to secure your backups, how you can help security, and how to recover from a ransomware attack. 

You need to look past the traditional workloads. Your company’s data is moving to SaaS applications and the cloud. If you’re not protecting the data where it is, you’re leaving the business exposed. 

We used to say, it’s not about backup, it’s about recovery. Now it’s not about data, but applications. How will you protect and recover your business applications? 

We have self-driving cars. It’s time for self-driving backups. You need a solution that takes care of managing your backups, so you can spend your time working with the business.”

Tony Liau, VP at Object First

“As we celebrate World Backup Day, it’s critical to acknowledge the pivotal role of backup and recovery in shielding organizations from the disastrous impacts of data loss. However, with the increasing frequency and sophistication of ransomware attacks, simply backing up data is no longer adequate. Organizations must ensure that their backups are immutable to prevent malicious encryption, which can cripple operations and result in significant financial losses. As we navigate the ever-evolving threat landscape, it’s crucial for organizations to proactively safeguard their data and ransomware-proof their environment by implementing proper data protection strategies that include immutable storage. Let’s take action today to safeguard our valuable data, maintain business continuity, and protect against ransomware attacks.”

Anthony Cusimano, Technical Director at Object First

“We celebrate backup because it’s the last bastion of defense against ransomware. With best practices in place, an acceptance that attacks will happen, and daily vigilance, backups are much more than an insurance policy. First, ensure you are running backups and verify that your backup strategy is behaving as expected and covers all the data you need to restore in a crisis. Second, test your recovery scenarios. Your backups are only as good as knowing what they are and where they belong. Third, ensure that your backups are backed up and practice the 3-2-1 policy – have three copies of your data stored in at least two locations, with at least one immutable copy. Lastly, ensure your backups are immutable. Encryption is good, but it can be decrypted if the admin accounts that control it are compromised (which they often can be when a complex attack occurs). Immutability is the only way to truly ransomware-proof your backups.”

Manikandan Thangaraj, VP of Program Management at ManageEngine

“Disaster recovery and data protection will play a crucial role in 2023. With ransomware attacks constantly garnering headlines, organizations should get used to the fact that it is impossible to prevent ransomware attacks entirely. It’s a question of when operations will be affected by ransomware, not if. Moreover, with the rise of Ransomware as a Service (RaaS) over the past couple of years, global ransomware damage costs are predicted to exceed $265B by 2031.

The only way organizations can withstand the threat of ransomware is by investing in disaster recovery solutions. Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) has been on the rise for the past few years and its market size is predicted to reach $41.26B by 2030. The winner of the battle between backup service providers and threat actors who leverage ransomware will be determined by how quickly DRaaS providers can react to potential new threats.

Organizations should prefer solutions built on the zero-trust security model to ensure data security. When it comes to data backup and recovery, using a zero-trust strategy will boost your data security by authenticating both the user and the device initiating the backup. Of course, achieving zero trust is a long and challenging journey, but it is a must for organizations that care about data security. zero trust Network Access (ZTNA) is anticipated to increase by 31 percent in 2023 according to Gartner, making it the fastest-growing area of network security.

Another recommended strategy to meet today’s evolving threats is to implement the 3-2-1-1 backup rule—which is an update to the popular 3-2-1 rule with the extra ‘1’ covering immutable storage. Immutability will restore your data to its original, unaltered state and get you back in operation within minutes of a breach, so you can be sure that you can recover your data even after a successful attack.”

Dr. Johannes Ullrich, Dean of Research at SANS Technology Institute 

“Data should be considered “at risk” if it can’t be found in at least three locations. Organizations should aim at maintaining an on-premise copy, a cloud or online-remote copy as well as an offline remote copy of critical data. In particular, sophisticated ransomware will attempt to disrupt recovery from backups, and any online backup, remote or local, is at risk.”

“Attackers are exploiting backup system vulnerabilities to access confidential information or to disrupt recovery after a ransomware incident. Cloud backups are often more vulnerable. Controls used to monitor access to on-premise backups do not always translate one-to-one to cloud-based systems. Designing a cloud-based solution, organizations need to consider how access is controlled, how requests to retrieve or store data are authenticated and how the backup live cycle from creation over retrieval to eventual deletion is managed.”

“Backup systems need to be redundant AND diverse. It does not help to have three copies of your data using the same cloud provider (even if the data is located in different zones). Use different technologies like on-promise, off-site/offline, and cloud.”

“One of the main reasons to invest in on-premise backups is to speed up recovery. Cloud and offsite backups will almost always be slower. In some cases, cloud backup providers may have mechanisms to accelerate the recovery of large amounts of data by shipping hard drives instead of using slower internet connections. Make sure you test recovery speed in order to better estimate how long it will take to recover large amounts of data.”

“Any data leaving your direct control, for example, physical backup media being shipped offsite, or cloud-based online backups, need to be encrypted before they leave the network you control. Backups need to be encrypted while in transit but also while at rest at the backup location. This may, in some cases, cause additional complexity, but rarely used backup data should always be encrypted.”

Amir Tarighat, CEO of Cybersecurity Company Agency

The post 45 World Backup Day Quotes from 32 Experts for 2023 appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.

Data Protection Demo Day Q1 2023 will feature live product demonstrations from leading enterprise storage and data protection vendors Arcserve and VAST Data.

What is Data Protection Demo Day?

Data Protection Demo Day for Q1 2023 is an exclusive virtual event featuring an inside look at the technologies of prominent enterprise storage and data protection solution providers. Solutions Review is hosting this online event as a way to present the latest data protection tools from the comfort and safety of your own desk, and the best part? It’s free to attend!

Join the largest data protection end-user community

Solutions Review Data Protection is the largest enterprise storage, backup, and recovery software buyer and practitioner community on the web. Our Universe of Influence reach is more than 7 million business and IT decision-makers, as well as C-suite and other top management professionals. Our readers primarily use us as an enterprise technology news source and trusted resource for solving some of their most complex problems.

Our Expert Insights Series resources are designed to provide forward-thinking analysis that helps business software practitioners and buyers remain on-trend, offer best practices for successful implementation, deployment, and piloting, and provide decision support during product/vendor evaluations. Solutions Review’s collection of vendor-agnostic buyer’s resources also aims to help data protection practitioners during the research and discovery phase of a buying cycle.

Featured Solution Providers

Arcserve offers several different backup products, including Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), Arcserve Replication and High Availability, Arcserve UDP Cloud Direct, UDP Cloud Hybrid, and a legacy offering. UDP provides comprehensive Assured Recovery for virtual and physical environments with a unified architecture, backup, continuous availability, migration, email archiving, and an easy-to-use console. The product enables organizations to scale their IT environments easily while delivering against recovery point and recovery time objectives, on-prem, or in the cloud.

VAST Data has developed the first all-flash storage platform that transforms the economics of flash storage in order to make flash infrastructure affordable for all classes of data, effectively making the hard drive and storage tiering obsolete. VAST’s platform is applied across a range of industries, offers next-generation life science advancements, and helped financial services organizations to stabilize the economy during the coronavirus outbreak.

FAQ

What: Solutions Review’s Data Demo Protection Day, Q1 2023

When: Thursday, March 30, 2023, from 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM Eastern

Where: Zoom meeting (see registration page for more detail)

Register for Data Protection Demo Day FREE

The post What to Expect at Solutions Review’s Data Protection Demo Day Q1 2023 on March 30 appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.

The editors at Solutions Review have curated this list of the most noteworthy storage and data protection news items for the week of March 24, 2023.

Keeping tabs on all the most relevant storage and data protection news can be a time-consuming task. As a result, our editorial team aims to provide a summary of the top headlines from the last week, in this space. Solutions Review editors will curate vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy storage and data protection news items.

Top Storage and Data Protection News for the Week of March 24, 2023

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Cisco Adds New Storage Networking Innovation on Product’s 20th Birthday

Cisco has introduced a number of groundbreaking storage networking innovations that leverage their entire data center networking arsenal, including Nexus switching and management technologies. These innovations have benefited customers over the last two decades.

Read on for more.

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Cohesity and OwnBackup Partner to Offer Simplified and Consolidated Data Protection for SaaS

This partnership will provide customers of both OwnBackup and Cohesity with enhanced capabilities to backup and seamlessly recover multiple data types, across a wide array of SaaS applications. With Cohesity and OwnBackup, customers will be able to choose to back up their data to their on-premises environment, or to a fully-managed cloud environment.

Read on for more.

Continuity Software Drops The State of Storage & Backup Security Report 2023

The findings underscore a significant gap in the state of enterprise storage and backup security, and shows how much it lags behind the security of other layers of IT. With the growing sophistication of data-centric attacks, the high volumes of data at risk and tightened regulations, enterprise storage and backup security clearly require urgent attention.

Read on for more.

Infinidat Hybrid Array ROI is 11 Months, According to New IDC Paper

This paper should make an interesting read for existing and prospective InfiniBox customers. It whets our appetite for a similar all-flash InfiniBox SSA white paper. Of course, this is sponsored research, so the findings should be independently verified by those evaluating data storage technologies.

Read on for more.

Quantum Releases Unified Surveillance Platform 5.0

This latest software version introduces patented video data reduction techniques to record thousands of video streams simultaneously at maximum uptime with fewer servers required, reducing risk of hardware failure and data center footprint by up to 80 percent.

Read on for more.

Expert Insights Section

Watch this space each week as Solutions Review editors will use it to share new Expert Insights Series articles, Contributed Shorts videos, Expert Roundtable and event replays, and other curated content to help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend. All to meet the demand for what its editors do best: bring industry experts together to publish the web’s leading insights for enterprise technology practitioners.

Solutions Review Set to Host Arcserve and VAST Data for Data Protection Demo Day on March 30

Data Protection Demo Day for Q1 2023 is an exclusive virtual event featuring an inside look at the technologies of prominent storage and data protection solution providers. Solutions Review is hosting this online event as a way to present the latest data protection tools from the comfort and safety of your own desk.

Read on for more.

Solutions Review’s Tim King Reveals the 3 Top Seagate NAS Drives to Consider for ’23

Seagate NAS drives offer reliable, high-performance storage solutions perfect for home or small office use. By considering your storage needs, security requirements, and total cost of ownership, you can choose the right Seagate NAS drive and rest easy knowing that your data is safe and easily accessible.

Read on for more.

Solutions Review’s Tim King Reveals the 3 Top Seagate NAS Drives to Consider for ’23

Seagate NAS drives offer reliable, high-performance storage solutions perfect for home or small office use. By considering your storage needs, security requirements, and total cost of ownership, you can choose the right Seagate NAS drive and rest easy knowing that your data is safe and easily accessible.

Read on for more.

For consideration in future storage and data protection news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.

The post Storage and Data Protection News for the Week of March 24; Updates from Arcserve, Cohesity, VAST Data & More appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.

Solutions Review editors assembled this resource containing the essential elements of a ransomware resilience assessment as an example for enterprises. For an even deeper breakdown of ransomware resiliency for enterprise storage, we recommend reading Continuity’s Dummies Guide.

Ransomware has become an increasingly prevalent threat to enterprises, with cybercriminals using sophisticated methods to gain access to sensitive data and systems. Enterprises must be proactive in their approach to ransomware, developing strategies and policies to prevent and mitigate the impact of these attacks.

One of the key opportunities for ransomware resilience is the use of modern security technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. These technologies can help enterprises identify and respond to ransomware attacks more quickly and effectively, allowing them to mitigate the impact of these attacks and minimize the damage to their data and systems.

However, there are also significant challenges to achieving ransomware resilience. One of the biggest challenges is the rapidly evolving nature of ransomware attacks. Cybercriminals are constantly developing new methods to evade detection and gain access to systems, making it difficult for enterprises to keep up with the latest threats and vulnerabilities.

Another challenge is the complexity of modern enterprise systems. As enterprises become more interconnected and rely on a wider range of technologies and devices, it becomes more difficult to secure these systems against ransomware attacks. Enterprises must invest in comprehensive security strategies that encompass all aspects of their systems, including network security, endpoint security, and data protection.

Finally, there is the challenge of maintaining awareness and education among employees. Human error is one of the biggest contributing factors to ransomware attacks, with employees falling victim to phishing emails and other social engineering tactics. Enterprises must invest in ongoing training and awareness programs to help employees identify and avoid these types of attacks.

Achieving ransomware resilience is both an opportunity and a challenge for enterprises. While modern security technologies offer new ways to detect and respond to ransomware attacks, the constantly evolving nature of these attacks and the complexity of modern enterprise systems present significant challenges. Enterprises must take a comprehensive approach to security, invest in ongoing training and awareness programs, and stay up to date with the latest threats and vulnerabilities to minimize the risk of ransomware attacks.

Ransomware Resilience Assessment Template

A ransomware resilience assessment template is an essential process for enterprise organizations to identify vulnerabilities and gaps in their security posture, and to develop a comprehensive strategy to protect against ransomware attacks. The following is an example ransomware resilience assessment for enterprise organizations.

Define Scope and Objectives

The first step in a ransomware resilience assessment is to define the scope and objectives of the assessment. This should include identifying the critical systems and data that need to be protected, and the potential impacts of a ransomware attack. The assessment should also consider the organization’s regulatory compliance requirements and any contractual obligations related to data security.

Identify Vulnerabilities & Threats

The next step is to identify vulnerabilities and threats that could potentially lead to a ransomware attack. This should include identifying potential entry points for ransomware, such as email attachments, malicious websites, or unpatched software. The assessment should also consider the likelihood and impact of different types of ransomware attacks, such as file encryption or system disruption.

Assess Current Security Measures

Once vulnerabilities and threats have been identified, the assessment should evaluate the organization’s current security measures to identify any gaps or weaknesses. This should include evaluating access controls, backup and recovery procedures, and incident response plans. The assessment should also evaluate the organization’s security awareness training programs for employees and third-party vendors.

Develop a Ransomware Resilience Strategy Based on the Assessment Findings

The organization should develop a comprehensive ransomware resilience strategy. This should include implementing additional security measures to address identified vulnerabilities and gaps, such as implementing multi-factor authentication, conducting regular security awareness training, and improving backup and recovery procedures. The strategy should also include a plan for incident response and business continuity in the event of a ransomware attack.

Implement and Test the Resilience Strategy

The final step is to implement the ransomware resilience strategy and test it regularly. This should include conducting regular penetration testing and vulnerability assessments, as well as testing the organization’s incident response and business continuity plans. The assessment should also include regular training and awareness programs for employees and third-party vendors to ensure that they are aware of the organization’s security policies and procedures.

A ransomware resilience assessment is an essential process for enterprise organizations to protect against the growing threat of ransomware attacks. By identifying vulnerabilities and threats, evaluating current security measures, and developing a comprehensive ransomware resilience strategy, organizations can minimize the risk of a ransomware attack and mitigate the potential impact of an attack. Regular testing and training are also critical to ensure that the organization’s security posture remains strong and resilient over time.

For an even deeper breakdown of ransomware resiliency for enterprise storage, we recommend reading Continuity’s Dummies Guide.

The post A Ransomware Resilience Assessment Template: 5 Essentials appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.

The editors at Solutions Review have curated this list of the most noteworthy storage and data protection news items for the week of March 3, 2023.

Keeping tabs on all the most relevant storage and data protection news can be a time-consuming task. As a result, our editorial team aims to provide a summary of the top headlines from the last week, in this space. Solutions Review editors will curate vendor product news, mergers and acquisitions, venture capital funding, talent acquisition, and other noteworthy storage and data protection news items.

Top Storage and Data Protection News for the Week of March 3, 2023

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Cisco Drives Simplified Operations and Energy Efficiency with Intersight and UCS X-Series

We built Cisco Intersight as a platform to deliver unified experiences and simplified operations for today’s digital-first enterprises. It is a cloud-delivered lifecycle management and automation platform to operate compute, storage, and networking infrastructure resources across data centers, clouds, and to the edge..

Read on for more.

EDB Launches Postgres Distributed 5.0

EnterpriseDB (EDB), the accelerator of Postgres in the enterprise, is launching EDB Postgres Distributed (PGD) 5.0, introducing extreme high availability for PostgreSQL—up to 99.999%+ availability via active-active technology, according to the vendor.

Read on for more.

Egnyte February Product Roadmap Includes New Search Queries and Smart Upload

Users can now save search queries that are run frequently in the Egnyte Web UI. Saved search queries include all search keywords and associated search filters. Egnyte Secure & Govern users can now change the issue status to ‘Dismiss’ for issues associated with Unusual access & Suspicious logins.

Read on for more.

Huawei Launched the Industry’s 1st “SOCC” Unified Disaster Recovery Portfolio Solution for Business Continuity and Perceptionless Recovery

At the Mobile World Congress (MWC) 2023, Huawei launched the industry’s first unified disaster recovery portfolio solution based on Storage & Optical Connection Coordination (SOCC). This portfolio solution integrates storage and optical transmission products to ensure that key businesses of enterprise customers are always online.

Read on for more.

IBM and Cohesity Announce New Data Security and Resiliency Collaboration

IBM and Cohesity today announced a new collaboration to address the critical need organizations have for increased data security and resiliency in hybrid cloud environments. Combining data protection, cyber resilience, and data management capabilities from both companies.

Read on for more.

IBM Announces its Plans to Reboot Storage Portfolios

IBM reckons its customers face three pressing data challenges and is realigning its storage product portfolio to measure up to them. The three challengers are adoption of AI/ML and HPC workloads; hybrid cloud app transformation and data movement from edge-to-core-to-cloud; and ensuring data resiliency in the face of malware.

Read on for more.

KIOXIA and HPE Team Up to Send SSDs into Space, Bound for the International Space Station

KIOXIA America, Inc. announces its proud participation in the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Spaceborne Computer-2 (SBC-2) program. As part of the program, KIOXIA SSDs provide robust flash storage in HPE Edgeline and HPE ProLiant servers in a test environment to conduct scientific experiments aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

Read on for more.

New Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v7 Delivers Advanced Protection Against Cyber Attacks and Outages

Veeam Software, ‘the leader in Modern Data Protection’, released NEW Veeam Backup for Microsoft 356 v7, the #1 backup and recovery solution for Microsoft 365 including Microsoft Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Microsoft Teams. With over 14 million users protected, the latest version of Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 strengthens data protection by enabling immutability…

Read on for more.

Microsoft, Rubrik Zero Trust Summit Stresses Precise Policy Rules, Baseline Setup

During this week’s Rubrik and Microsoft Zero Trust Summit, zero trust, and identity security experts emphasized the significance of implementing specific granular policy rules, validation techniques, and baseline establishment to ensure that authorized individuals access designated resources at the appropriate times.

Read on for more.

Nyriad and DigitalGlue Partner to Enable Creatives to Optimize Resources

Nyriad and DigitalGlue are partnering to dramatically improve the performance, resilience, and efficiency of media production workflows while removing complex IT-centric tasks and simplifying them with a streamlined user experience. In doing so, creatives and contributors will be able to optimize resources, eliminate costly delays in post-production, and deliver great content on deadline and on budget.

Read on for more.

Pure Storage Announces April 2023 Release Date for FlashBlade//E 

Pure Storage announced FlashBlade//E, a scale-out unstructured data repository built to handle exponential data growth with industry-leading energy efficiency. At an acquisition cost competitive with disk and much lower operational costs, the introduction of FlashBlade//E means that customers no longer need to settle for disk.

Read on for more.

Expert Insights Section

Watch this space each week as Solutions Review editors will use it to share new Expert Insights Series articles, Contributed Shorts videos, Expert Roundtable and event replays, and other curated content to help you gain a forward-thinking analysis and remain on-trend. All to meet the demand for what its editors do best: bring industry experts together to publish the web’s leading insights for enterprise technology practitioners.

Solutions Review’s Tim King Names the Best Seagate NAS Drives for 2023

Seagate NAS drives offer reliable, high-performance storage solutions perfect for home or small office use. By considering your storage needs, security requirements, and total cost of ownership, you can choose the right Seagate NAS drive and rest easy knowing that your data is safe and easily accessible.

Read on for more.

Former Symantec & Splunk CISO Joel Fulton Reveals 6 Steps to Ensure Compliant Storage Backup Systems

Compliance with industry standards and regulatory mandates can absorb an inordinate amount of IT and executive attention. Organizations spend a great deal of time verifying they comply with the different requirements of security frameworks requirements and regulations such as CIS, NIST, PCI DSS, NERC CIP, PHI/HIPAA-HITECH, DISA, FFIEC, NIS Directive, MAS-TRM, FISMA, ISO, NYDFS, and others).

Read on for more.

Scality Field CTO Candida Valois Explains How Ransomware Defense Fears Drive Backup & Storage Strategy

Multiple surveys of IT leaders reiterate that they view Job #1 as ransomware protection. It’s the lead item on every set of board slides and scrawled across every white board, with multiple action items beneath. The near inevitability of malfeasance has redefined priorities and aligned IT teams with a new set of technology answers. Three concerns are driving new, more robust strategies that can outsmart bad actors.

Read on for more.

For consideration in future storage and data protection news roundups, send your announcements to the editor: tking@solutionsreview.com.

The post Storage and Data Protection News for the Week of March 3; Updates from IBM, Pure Storage, Veeam & More appeared first on Best Backup and Disaster Recovery Tools, Software, Solutions & Vendors.