Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Backup, protection and compliance

By Sovan Bin, CEO of Odaseva

Throughout 2021, we saw a lot of stressed-out CIOs, with increasing numbers of demands on their data systems. These CIOs are wondering how to cope. Here are three specific trends that I have seen in backup, agility and protection and expect to continue into 2022.

Proving that data is protected

Last year, organizations were asking themselves, "Are we protected in our data?" Now we are seeing a huge shift towards organizations saying: ‘How can we prove that we are protected?' Rather than just ticking a box that they have a backup system, organizations are now looking to optimise their RTO (recovery time objective) - or how long it takes to recover data after an issue. In 2022, more and more large organizations will start to take their RTO objective seriously, doing quarterly testing on these timings. At Odaseva, we stand out in the market because we can get RTO down to just 15 minutes, even for large enterprises.

This, in turn, is helping organizations comply with the governance frameworks that they're working within. People need to prove to their business networks that they have a backup - they can't just assume that the cloud provides it all. They need to show that data is secure and recoverable, and how fast they can recover it.

Anonymizing sandboxes

Like this year, in 2022, organizations will need to protect different development environments - with everyone working from home there's a much greater interest in who has access to data. For example, within developer teams, there are people evaluating test data and making sure it's anonymized and secure - improving the entire development process. Organizations are anonymizing their sandboxes and protecting their data development. Often, they're finding they don't have enough anonymized data - how do they improve that process and the efficiency of it? That question will be asked in 2022.

Centralizing data demands

More and more organizations are seeing an increased demand on their CRM data from more systems - in turn this is causing increased demand on API resources to replicate CRM data.

For example, we're hearing from large telecom providers who want to replicate their data every five minutes, or 15 minutes, to other data warehouses, and this needs to be integrated into a wider data strategy. The overall goal is increased business agility. This requires many demands on CRM data. We can take advantage of the fact that we're backing up data - that data can be applied to agile business processes. Data can be forwarded to other platforms, killing two birds with one stone. We can offer the ability to utilise external connectors, not just to grab data and back it up, but to reduce demands on their CRM system. The more endpoints you build into the system, the more congested, and slow the system becomes. By centralizing a lot of these data demands, you can leverage your backup solution to take care of that problem - and that becomes incredibly powerful for large organizations - ultimately making them more agile.

Global privacy requirements require localization

Privacy regulation will continue to go global while requiring increasing localized implementation and storage. 2021 saw the China Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL) passed at astonishing speed, cementing this trend. The extent of the requirements will become clearer as implementing regulations are introduced in 2022.

Consumer rights will finally start to bite in the U.S.

As companies have to prepare for compliance deadlines of existing State Laws (California, Virginia, Colorado) starting Jan 1, 2023, and Washington and other states will continue their attempts to pass similar legislation. Federal Privacy legislation in the U.S. will not be a priority as we enter the third year of the pandemic and legislators are still far from a compromise on comprehensive, generally applicable privacy legislation.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sovan Bin is CEO of Odaseva, a company he founded in 2012 to answer the need for better data privacy, data protection and data operations in cloud services. Before founding Odaseva, Sovan spent six years at Salesforce leading the architect team in Paris where he was 1st CTA (Certified Technical Architect) in EMEA.