Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2019. Read them in this 11th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed by Bill Tolson, Vice President of Marketing Archive360
The Cloud Will Lead to Greater Business Transformation in 2019
For 2019, leading analyst firm Gartner emphasizes the importance
of enterprises continuing the move toward making more innovative use of the
cloud-and partnering with cloud service vendors to acquire the needed
capabilities to leverage the cloud's unique benefits-noting that this strategy
can help companies achieve a true digital transformation.
"Enterprises no longer have the luxury of
taking a long time to make these changes," Gartner states. "Cloud, as well as
other technology drivers, lower the barrier to entry for new competitors. But
cloud can accelerate time to transformation and even make it possible for
mature companies to behave like a startup."
Gartner describes transformation as "changing
the behavior of people, systems, and ‘things' (IoTs) to deliver business
outcomes," noting that achieving this is a top priority for forward-thinking CEOs,
whether focusing on digital business, the customer experience, or other
business strategies in 2019. With this predictive industry insight in mind,
it's important for enterprises to know exactly how the cloud can transform their business in the New Year and
beyond. There are two main areas to watch for in the coming year:
1. Securing and Protecting Data in the Cloud
with ‘Isolated Recovery'
The
continued battery of ransomware attacks that filled headlines in 2018 has
justifiably led many companies to reconsider their data protection strategy for
2019. With new and growing threats being planned by ransomware hackers as we
speak, the types of traditional backup-such as tape and disk-that have been old
standbys for decades are no longer sufficient. One reason is that because of
the cyclical nature of backup processes, time-delayed ransomware can quickly
infect the backup server. Savvy ransomware hackers know this and can cause
intentional delays to ensure the corruption of all backup systems.
The
upcoming year will see the spotlight turn toward a new method of data
protection: Isolated Recovery-or the recovery of known good/clean data-which
can be set up in a cloud enviroment. This strategy relies on the principles of
isolation and "air gaps," and involves using an
isolated storage repository - either physical or electronic, with all users
restricted except those who have proper clearance. Isolated Recovery involves
generating a regularly created "gold copy" pre-infection backup and completely
isolating it so the data remains pristine and available for use when it's
needed. The only way to ensure that you have a truly uninfected backup is to
regularly generate isolated gold copies of a company's most mission-critical
data, so you have a clean backup to use if and when ransomware strikes.
In
2019, it will be important for enterprises to fully understand the concept of air
gaps and how they relate to the cloud. Cloud storage systems are connected by
design for IT access, yet an air gap requires a storage system that's
disconnected from the outer world. That's why the "gold copy" status of the
backup is such an important requirement for an isolated recovery system.
So
the new strategy to secure and protect data in the cloud and guarantee the gold
copy status of a backup stored there will be to write it to immutable storage,
where it will be "isolated" due to its immutability. Expect to see a growing
number of organizations with company critical data-including the financial and
healthcare sectors-begin using regularly scheduled, separate backups saved to
Azure WORM storage as part of their disaster recovery planning to protect
against ransomware.
2. Using the Cloud for Machine
Learning
In 2019, enterprises will gain a long-term business advantage by investing
more into AI/machine learning to fully automate many decision-making processes
i.e., taking the vagaries of human interaction to achieve more accurate and
consistent outcomes. A key part of the AI/machine learning inflection point is
the availability of self-learning or "unsupervised" machine learning capability in which the computer
literally trains itself based on the data set provided, with no need for lengthy training cycles.
This is key for adoption of automated categorization, more efficient records
management, and higher and more nimble security.
In preparation, companies should ensure
that all corporate data is centrally stored, secure, and available-by regularly
consolidating individual data silos so that predictive information management
security can be realized. The potential benefits are just now being understood
by much of application developer market. Predictive information management
allows enterprises to address the challenge of managing large volumes of
unmanaged employee data, which generally represents around 80 percent of an
enterprise's data.
Unsupervised machine learning capability
for automated data management are poised to become the holy grail for
information handling, but overall cost is a potential issue. To keep costs low
enough to make machine learning capabilities available to all, it will be
imperative for cloud platforms (like Microsoft Azure) to offer machine
learning technology as an included service, and in reality, Microsoft has indeed
taken care of this.
In preparation for the year ahead,
enterprises should seek a cloud-managed storage and archive solution for
compliance and long-term data management built on Azure Cloud Services. It's
already possible to find a highly secure, low-cost, legally compliant
enterprise storage repository and archive to store and manage records,
unstructured data, and legal data sets. Using a solution that's built on
the Azure Cloud also means that Microsoft's machine learning technology is
already available to all Azure application developers. Predictive information
management are coming relatively soon, so 2019 is the perfect time to start moving
your data to the Azure Cloud.
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About the Author
Bill Tolson is Vice President of
Marketing for Archive360 (www.archive360.com). He has more than 25
years of experience with multinational corporations and technology start-ups,
including 15-plus years in the archiving, ECM, information governance,
regulations compliance and legal eDiscovery markets. Prior to joining
Archive360, Bill held leadership positions at Actiance, Recommind, Hewlett
Packard, Iron Mountain, Mimosa Systems, and StorageTek.
Bill is a much
sought and frequent speaker at legal, regulatory compliance and
information governance industry events and has authored numerous articles and
blogs. Bill is the author of two eBooks: "The Know IT All's Guide to
eDiscovery" and "The Bartenders Guide to eDiscovery." He is also the author of
the book "Cloud Archiving for Dummies" and co-author of the book "Email
Archiving for Dummies." Bill holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business
Management from California State University Dominguez Hills.