Despite the ongoing economic challenges facing many businesses and sectors across the world, the New Year has brought with it the prospect of a post-pandemic recovery. While in business terms, 2020 was characterized by emergency, short-term crisis management, organizational agility and a constant sense of uncertainty, medium and long-term planning is now back on the agenda.
From a technology perspective, leaders can now refocus on something approaching ‘business as usual’. Granted, COVID-19 has accelerated the pace of change, permanently altered working culture and cemented the role of digital transformation, but some core priorities remain. Among the most important is data strategy, or more specifically, how organizations prioritize and deliver data mobility, management and protection.
Data protection is always big news – ransomware attacks have become sadly routine, and the most recent massive hacking scandal underlines the need for organizations everywhere to raise their game. The inveterate procrastination that still governs data protection investment across so many sectors is – time and again – only corrected after a serious breach spurs leaders into action.
Take ransomware attacks, for example, which have become a standard ‘business model’ for cybercriminals, with government organizations, universities and a myriad of private companies severely affected. Back in January, for example, currency dealer Travelex suffered a major attack that disrupted its operations for a month, resulting in a multi-million payout to the criminals responsible and contributing to the business going into administration, with 1,300 jobs lost.
Barely a month later, ISS World, a major international facilities company with half a million employees, was severely disrupted by a ransomware attack. Remediation and rebuild costs were expected to cost tens of millions, not to mention the impact on customers, employees and business reputation.
The collective bottom line of these risks is truly staggering, and has been described by CyberSecurity Ventures as, “one of the biggest challenges that humanity will face in the next two decades.” They expect the annual cost of cybercrime as a whole to reach $6 TRILLION next year.
For CIOs and CISOs, data protection strategy is as much about mindset as it is about technology investment. It’s imperative that their approach to storage and backup must become “unbreakable” – a concept that not only significantly increases protection against attack, but allows victims to recover should an attack succeed. Pragmatism requires that prevention and recovery are given equal priority – anything else risks placing businesses into denial, where they think they aren’t going to be attacked or can’t be breached. For data protection and backup strategies to succeed, access to immutable copies of critical unstructured data has never been more important. Without them, organizations are at the mercy of external forces beyond their control.
At the same time, businesses are looking to see a much greater return on their investment in data. The underlying argument about the ‘value’ of data has been won, and business leaders are now fully committed to the benefits that data-driven insight can deliver. But, as enterprises build strategies around increasingly complex infrastructure, data mobility becomes a significant challenge. For some, an inability to quickly, safely, and affordably migrate data is not only damaging to wider IT projects, which in turn limits the ability of businesses to deliver strategic value from their data.
As a result, data mobility is becoming a major priority for IT leaders who are committed to multi-cloud infrastructure strategies. However, the complexity traditionally associated with data migration, synchronization and replication represents a major barrier to progress. Instead, seamless data mobility and management is key to the success of today’s heterogeneous on-premises, remote and cloud environments.
No matter where organizations store their data, effective data mobility must provide a way to move data to or from any vendor’s storage array, tape, public or private clouds. By delivering the data where it’s needed, businesses can eliminate data silos, improve employee productivity, and achieve an additional layer of data protection.
If 2021 does indeed deliver a return to normality and the opportunity to move forward into a post-pandemic environment, organizations who are successful in balancing these objectives will be better placed to take advantage of new opportunities or meet unexpected challenges. The alternative is to accept that vulnerability – either to cybercrime, technology shortcomings or more agile competitors – is the best that can be achieved. There are few business leaders out there who would view that as an acceptable strategy.
