By Executives and Evangelists at Zerto

A Year for Resilience

With 2019 winding down, we here at Zerto want to share what we believe is in store for the year ahead. In 2020, it's clear that businesses will need to focus on becoming more resilient in the face of cyber threats and downtime resulting from a variety of planned and unplanned outages.

The most pressing themes we want to point out deal with making resiliency a pillar of digital transformation, cybersecurity and infrastructure stability. There's no doubt that 2020 is the year of IT Resilience.

Here's what our team has to say about 2020:

Caroline Seymour, VP, product marketing, Zerto 

"As we set new visions and strategies for 2020 and begin a new decade of unprecedented levels of both tech innovation and data dependence, it will be paramount for IT organizations of all sizes to support cyber resilient cultures and processes. Organizations of the future must be built to not just prevent but also withstand cyber risk of all forms.

In addition to the disruptions every organization faces from unexpected natural disasters, human error and outages, the global threat landscape continues to grow at a ferocious pace. According to research by Cybersecurity Ventures, the estimated cost of ransomware alone for 2019 was $11.5 billion, which is more than many global industries and markets. The cost of not being cyber resilient could put many companies out of business with ransomware recovery per organization at approximately $1.4 million or more. This cost is directly tied to a loss of productivity, reputation damage and service disruption, among other business impacts.

Whether large global enterprises, midsize companies or government agencies, no one is safe. Organizations must implement cyber resilience strategies that enable them to prepare for, respond to and recover from a cyberattack. Cyber resilience is much more than just preventing or responding to an attack - it also takes into account the ability to operate during and to adapt and recover from such an event. Businesses that maintain strong cyber resilience frameworks - that includes the ability to identify, protect, detect, respond and recover - will be well positioned for success in 2020 and beyond."

Ziv Kedem, CEO, Zerto

"Today, we are living in an environment where we're experiencing increased intensity and frequency of hurricanes, forest fires and other natural disasters, and we're also seeing an increased focus on infrastructure stability. This increased focus usually involves looking into the solidity of roads, bridges, dams, hospitals, water systems and more, but in today's digital world, network and technology infrastructure resilience needs to be a major part of the conversation as well. Internet access and data center operations are critical to community recovery efforts, and ensuring resilience on the IT side of infrastructure also has the added benefit of protecting against damaging effects of other digital disasters, like ransomware."

Avi Raichel, CIO, Zerto

"By now, most companies have already begun their digital transformation journey. In so doing, they've learned one important lesson: you can't become digital without deploying one or more cloud infrastructure architectures. With that in mind, cloud usage will continue to grow in 2020 and become a strategic part of any IT transformation modernization process-be it via hybrid cloud, multi-cloud or a different combination environment. Organizations will continue looking for solutions that will enable this complex architecture to connectedly run between on-premises data centers and multiple cloud solutions.

Additionally, cyberthreats will continue to be a major, strategic risk for companies in 2020, especially those going through a digital transformation. These risks include loss of productivity, loss of revenue, loss of customers and severe-often irreversible-damages to the brand. The more digital your company becomes, the more you lean on your IT staff. This tight correlation means that whenever there is a disruption to your IT, it becomes a disruption to your whole business. Consequently, IT resilience will become increasingly invaluable to companies as they undertake-and complete-their digital transformation journeys.

In 2020, we anticipate a continued shift to a more fully digital business model and expect the vitality of cyber resilience, IT resilience and business resilience to follow suit."

Steve Blow, technology evangelist, Zerto

"In 2020, it goes without saying that cyber threats, especially ransomware attacks, will continue to grow-especially as criminals are making considerable money from them. I predict we will see an increase in attacks that are more targeted than they are random. This will cost organizations money, not just from the ransom side of things, but from a data loss perspective. Data loss is money loss, and the only way businesses can prevent data loss is to make sure that they are constantly protecting it."

Obviously, any organization that experiences downtime will need to get back up and running immediately and should know the damaging impact if they don't. In 2020, more and more organizations will look to their trusted technology partners for solutions to these all too common problems and thrive by staying ahead of the demands and threats of digital business.