Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2020. Read them in this 12th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
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.
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