Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
By Prem Ananthakrishnan, vice president of products at Druva
The next era of cloud transformation
The next decade will
bring new technologies and standards that will radically transform traditional
business models, but today, businesses are looking for ways to keep up with the
rapid pace of change, from increasing regulations and security risks to
constant technical innovations and required business agility. It's clear that
all roads lead to the cloud, and we are already seeing the decline of data
centers. The maturation of advanced analytics, and these trends will only grow
over time. Taking a look ahead, here are my thoughts on what we will see in the
new year, and how businesses can best prepare.
Data for next generation businesses will never touch a
traditional data center
Data centers are consolidating at a startling rate.
While they likely won't disappear completely and can help meet specific use
cases, the overwhelming of new businesses are not leasing or building
traditional data centers. New companies such as Slack, Zoom, ServiceNow, Box,
and Twillio are 100 percent cloud based. And meanwhile, existing companies are
migrating to the cloud. The business model for new companies' infrastructure is
changing, and companies are realizing they do not need to be in the data center
business anymore to successfully run their business. The traditional data
centers as we know it are becoming obsolete.
Improved data hygiene will become a standard insurance
requirement
Ransomware and cyber
attacks will expand in 2020 because they work. Targeted organizational attacks
will unfortunately continue to increase across industries and governments and
hackers are relentless in searching for any exposure in an ecosystem - whether
it is gullible users, unpatched systems, or misconfigured cloud accounts.
Cyber-criminals know that you will pay to save your data, your job, and your
reputation. They also know many companies now have cyber insurance to help pay
the bill.
As a result of the
ongoing attacks, cyber insurance companies will increasingly demand proof of
protection and recovery plans. They cannot stay in business and continue to pay
out claims to companies that aren't taking certain steps to protect themselves.
To get insured, organizations will need to document a holistic plan to deal with
cyber threats - both preventing and recovering from attacks. Providers will
also become more prescriptive about categorizing claims. Today many ransomware
claims are submitted under errors and omissions (E&O), which is a very
general category protecting companies and their workers against claims of
inadequacy. Cyber insurers will start rolling out specific claim guidelines
that account for lost or compromised data rather than filing everything under
the broad E&O category.
SaaS backup will be a
prevalent method for recovering from cyber-attacks since it stores data in a
separately managed cloud account. The air gap from data center to cloud
protects the data from ransomware, and separation of control secures the data
from deletion by malicious internal actors. Additionally, SaaS offers faster
recovery in the event of an attack with the ability to restore data anywhere -
including running permanently in the cloud, while ensuring higher reliability
for recovery through automated testing and machine learning to confirm data
fidelity.
Cloud providers will pay big for analytics companies
Cloud providers are rich with data, but without proper
analytics features this data is underutilized. The market is teeming with
analytics startups, but the successful ones have niche, vertical-specific
applications that leverage their expertise. I would expect companies will look
to either partner with - or more likely acquire - these smaller companies to
add analytics capabilities to their own applications. The number of M&A
deals with smaller analytics companies will skyrocket in 2020.
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About the Author
Prem Ananthakrishnan is vice president of products at Druva, the industry's leading data protection and
management solution built for the cloud era.