Ransomware, Intelligent Endpoint Data Management, and Cloud Spend

By Team at Commvault

It has been a busy year for IT professionals as well as for Commvault. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many to accelerate their cloud adoption and other digital transformation initiatives, making it more important than ever for them to intelligently manage, move and protect business critical data. This growing need for intelligent data management has increased demand for Commvault's data protection solutions, as professionals seek innovative ways to simplify the management of their organization's data, whether it resides on-premises, on multiple clouds, or on the laptops that they and other people at their organization are using to work from home.

As you find yourself wondering what 2021 might hold for you as you are likely working from home this holiday season, here are some of the data management challenges, opportunities, and other market developments that Commvault's Matthew Tyrer, Rahul Pawar, and Param Kumarasamy predicts you and other IT professionals might face in 2021.

Matthew Tyrer, Senior Manager, Solutions Marketing at Commvault

Security, Governance and Other Data Analytics Come to the Cloud

• In 2020, enterprises around the world rushed to move applications and workloads to the cloud to accommodate the shift to people working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the chickens have come home to roost, and these companies are now waking up to the fact that they don't have the security, data governance, and other analytics in place to intelligently manage the data they have moved from their on-premises infrastructure to various different clouds. Meanwhile, cybercriminals are developing more sophisticated attacks to steal or ransom this data. In addition, government regulators are still expecting companies to govern their data in accordance with GDPR and other data privacy regulations, whether this data is found in their data center or on the cloud. Given this, I expect over the next six months we will see more than one company that jumped unprepared into the cloud suffer a ransomware attack, data breach, be hit with a major fine for lax data privacy compliance, or similar incident. This is not because the cloud is inherently insecure or hard to govern. However, while most companies have in place at least some technologies and processes to secure, govern, and otherwise intelligently manage the data found between the four walls of their data centers, many do not have the same technologies and processes in place for the data they now have on multiple clouds. That is why I am hearing extensively from customers that one of their priorities in the new year will be the extension of their core data center security, governance, and other analytics services to cloud. And it is why I expect that in 2021 we will see strong growth for data analytics solutions that allow companies to audit their data, comply with data privacy regulations, secure data from ransomware and other cyberattacks, and rapidly recovery their data after a disaster - whether this data is located on-premises or in the cloud.

Rahul Pawar, Vice President of Products  at Commvault

As More People Work From Home, Intelligent Endpoint Data Management Emerges as a Priority for IT

• The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in employers around the world asking millions of employees to work from home that had not done so before. As a result, many employers and employees realized that working from home delivered them significant benefits (shorter commutes, lower office space expenses). This has led many employers to institute policies that will enable their employees to work from home at least a few days a week even after the pandemic (hopefully) subsides. However, one drawback facing companies whose employees are working from home is that they have much less control over data protection, data privacy regulatory compliance, and other aspects of data management than they do when these employees connect their laptops to their office's corporate network. At the same time, ransomware and other cyberattacks are increasing, while governments are implementing and enforcing stricter data privacy regulations. Because of this, expect in 2021 to see more companies deploy solutions that allow them to intelligently protect, govern, and otherwise manage the data on their employees' laptops and other endpoints. In particular, expect to see growth of intelligent data management solutions that use AI and similar technologies. Using these technologies these solutions can detect anomalous behavior indicating a ransomware attack, or private customer information stored in a place or manner it should not be, allowing companies to nip ransomware, data privacy and similar data management problems in the bud.

• The agility that containers provide to organizations trying to accelerate their move to the cloud will continue to fuel demand for container-based applications. In particular, the fact that containers can be used to make applications cloud-native will drive growth of the container market. By using containers to make their applications cloud native, companies can improve these applications cloud scalability and performance, and also more easily move these applications between different clouds - helping them accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.

Param Kumarasamy, Vice President of Product Management at Commvault

Organizations Will Search for Ways To Optimize Their Cloud Spend

COVID-19 accelerated many companies' cloud migration efforts, and given growing C-level executive demand to minimize data center and other on premises infrastructure footprints, this move to the cloud will only continue. However, as rising cloud service expenses increasingly bite into organizations' IT budgets, expect in 2021 to see IT departments scramble to find ways to optimize their cloud costs. These efforts are likely to include cloud arbitrage - meaning companies will try to find the lowest cost cloud provider able to deliver the SLAs and other performance capabilities they need for a particular workload. Cloud arbitrage will in turn increase interest in solutions that allow companies to easily move data between different clouds. In addition, companies will adopt intelligent data management solutions that allow them to analyze and monitor the data they have stored across multiple clouds with a fine-toothed comb. With the insights provided by these solutions, these companies will be able to move less critical or used data to lower cost cloud storage tiers or just delete the data if it is not needed, allowing them to reduce their cloud service expenses.

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