Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2018.  Read them in this 10th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Contributed by Rick Vanover, Director of Product Strategy at Veeam

Disasters and Data Growth – Predictions for 2018

2017 will be over before you know it and now is the time to think about what 2018 will look like. At Veeam, we have made significant changes to our products to adapt to current technology changes and trends; and any IT decision maker, end user or anyone else in between has surely made changes as well. Here are what Veeam sees that will make 2018 different:

• Ransomware preparations galore. There are so many non-IT issues that organizations are dealing with today. The threat of ransomware of ransomware is real. Next year we'll see that risk grow, not only because the number of attacks will increase, but also because we may start seeing insiders making ransomware as a service kits as well. There will be no shortage of resiliency options for organizations to protect against ransomware from the inside and the outside.
• Disaster recovery 2.0. 2017 was unfortunately an incredibly bad year for both the number and intensity of natural disasters. This will encourage organizations to challenge many of the fundamentals of disaster recovery and business continuity. One specific bit of "best practice" I'll challenge is the idea that 10 miles is enough distance for accepted separation. This year's fires, hurricanes, earthquakes and floods clearly demonstrated that 10 miles is nowhere near enough distance. This realization paves the way for cloud and service provider technologies to provide the solution to the distance problem, as well as additional missing capabilities and robust tools that orchestrate the process to give organizations the Availability they need in a disaster.
• Portability is king. Organizations will be more comfortable to move workloads around as they see fit. Whether that is on-premises, in the hyper public cloud, in a service provider or a complete transition to a Software as a Service model, the right platform to run a service will prevail, and organizations will do what is needed to move these workloads and keep them Available. The important takeaway to remember is that responsibilities don't necessarily change when applications, data and services move to a new platform.
• Managing data vs. managing storage. I predict organizations will take a marked approach to looking at their data and managing it better. The explosive amount of data coming in really isn't sustainable. Organizations will take a serious look at archiving selected data, which will require policies to be re-written, conversations with the business and even new platforms leveraged. These new platforms will include offline object storage technologies like Amazon Glacier or Azure Cool Blob storage. This will be a great way to comply with business rules for long-term retention of that isn't accessed often. Additionally, this is a great middle ground when organizations can't agree on when to delete data.

It's hard to put down specific predictions for a year, but the reality is the technology landscape today provides endless possibilities for organizations to provide great services for the data center and the information it provides. At Veeam we focus on keeping that data and those systems Available, which enables organizations to run their business.

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About the Author

Rick Vanover (Cisco Champion, MVP, vExpert) is the Director of Product Strategy for Veeam Software based in Columbus, Ohio. Rick's IT experience includes system administration and IT management; with virtualization being the central theme of his career recently. Follow Rick on Twitter @RickVanover or @Veeam.