By Oussama El-Hilali, CTO, Arcserve

Hybrid and multi-cloud solutions take center stage

At this point, there's no stopping the cloud from taking over the enterprise. SaaS-based applications are experiencing a massive boom; on average, employees are using at least eight different SaaS-based apps in their enterprise, and spending on them continues to rise. On top of that, companies are going through digital transformation initiatives and moving more data to the cloud than ever before. But, traditional data centers and BCDR strategies were not designed with the cloud in mind or for the sheer volume of data that exists today. In 2020, IT managers will need to modernize their data backup approach by prioritizing multi and hybrid cloud solutions, especially if they expect to keep up with the influx of data and SaaS-backed applications - in addition to fending off the cyber criminals seeking to exploit them.

Changing the approach to cloud deployments

Right now, 85% of IT decision makers agree that hybrid cloud infrastructures are the ideal cloud model, yet only 10% of organizations feel that they are ready to implement them. Traditionally, multi and hybrid cloud environments have a bad rap for being difficult to set up, as there are complexities associated with determining which data needs to be stored on-site, and which can go in the cloud. IT managers can get bogged down as they take stock of the individual needs of each system or application. Given the pervasiveness of SaaS-backed applications and systems in 2019 and the upcoming new year, organizations will need to start taking much larger-scale approaches to rolling out multi and hybrid cloud solutions.

Greater planning and care will need to be taken when it comes to the rollout of these infrastructures, to ensure sure every single application and system has been properly mapped out, and priority has been assigned to the applications that are the most business-critical.

On top of the complexities in rolling out multi and hybrid cloud, migrating data and applications can seem daunting to organizations, and it isn't always user-friendly. This trend is also going to have to change in 2020, as we're going to see vendors continue to streamline migration for their customers to keep pace with the growth of companies using multi and hybrid cloud solutions. For instance, we will start to see greater efforts put towards automation that eliminates manual steps in the migration process and that doesn't disrupt or impact production systems.

Standardization of security models

Another reason deployment of multi and hybrid cloud models have been slow is that IT decision-makers are worried about security. For example, it can be easy for a security gap to result from a misconfiguration, which inadvertently opens a backdoor for cybercriminals to jack data. So, we're also going to start to see organizations go to greater lengths to standardize their cloud security models and ensure critical data is kept safe and resilient.

This is critical for today's IT departments that need to be aware of potential areas of data loss, be it a ransomware attack or natural disaster striking. Multi-cloud solutions also give IT departments an added layer of security; by leveraging multiple cloud services at once, IT managers and CISOs can hand pick which data goes where, and how it is stored. Leveraging a single public cloud leaves companies at risk if that cloud provider goes down via ransomware attack or other data disaster. In a multi-cloud environment, automatic failover can be triggered if an outage occurs by moving critical data to another location. By diversifying where your data goes, you stay resilient in the face of threats, and keep the data accessible.

Looking to 2020

The bottom line in 2020 is that multi and hybrid cloud being too complex is no longer an excuse to not be leveraging those types of infrastructures. If it's because a knowledge gap, then a greater investment into training and reskilling will need to be made to ensure that IT teams have the knowledge of emerging tech that they need to be able to keep pace. As the ransomware threat continues to rise, threating to derail IT operations on a daily basis, data resiliency becomes even more critical.

One-size-fits-all solutions aren't going to cut it anymore, and IT managers need to diversify their approach to ensure true resiliency for their organization's systems and data.

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About the Author

Oussama El-Hilali serves as the CTO of Arcserve and is responsible for setting the global product strategy, and managing the development and product management teams. He has nearly 25 years of IT and R&D experience driving and achieving product strategy and roadmaps, acquisition of new technology, and developing strategic business partnerships in both Fortune 100 and emerging companies.