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.