Disaster recovery and business continuity software vendor Zerto says the move to the cloud will only increase in 2018, but security and resilience should not be forgotten.
Andrew Martin, vice-president for Zerto Asia Pacific and Japan, spoke to iTWire about his four predictions for 2018. Unsurprisingly, Martin sees cloud transformation continuing to be a big topic, but cautions businesses not to forget the importance of business continuity plans.
Zerto’s prediction #1: Digital transformation will drive the need for greater IT resilience.
The continued move towards a digital economy will see a greater transformation of customer experiences through, Martin states. “To capture this opportunity, enterprises need to embrace new operating models that can dramatically improve and enhance the digital customer experience with customers increasingly expecting an always-on experience.”
{loadposition david08}Enterprises will thus look to converge solutions addressing both short-term and long-term data protection. This will help simplify operational efforts and increase flexibility.
IT environments will become more complex, storing and protecting huge amounts of data being generated, and will be increasingly platform agnostic, moving away from dependence on specific hypervisors or operating systems.
Downtime will not be tolerated, especially if an outage has serious financial or repetitional ramifications.
Prediction #2: Cloud will be used more extensively to support data-intensive activities.
“We will start to see more data-intensive activities move to the cloud as organisations increasingly look to consolidate data centres, migrate data and workloads to drive efficiencies, reduce risk and cost. With cloud storage costs expected to decline, the cloud will be an increasingly attractive option to IT professionals and the finance department,” Martin said.
“In ANZ, we are seeing greater adoption of these technologies across nearly every sector, particularly the financial services and insurances sectors. This region will also see more companies that service the retail sector such as those that offer POS and ERP systems for consumer transaction enablement, adopt these technologies.“
Prediction #3: Increased convergence of DR and IT security strategies.
As data breaches and ransomware attacks continue to impact organisations and result in outages and loss, businesses will seek holistic approaches that embrace security and disaster recovery in their IT strategies.
“Organisations will have to accept that their first line of defence is going to be breached from time to time and it’s no longer a matter of if but when it will happen,” Martin says.
Prediction #4: Tape for backup will meet its demise.
As newer storage technologies are developed, the long-term storage backup mainstay tape will finally meet its end.
“Tape is a liability for many organisations due to its high cost. Organisations are increasingly finding there are other options for archiving large amounts of data as cheaply as doing on tape. Making the transition from tape can have its challenges so organisations need to ensure they have a robust and resilient DR strategy in place,” Martin says.
