By Eric Herzog, CMO, Infinidat
It’s that time of year again for Infinidat to share our storage market trend predictions for the new year. Based on our experience as an enterprise storage solution provider to Fortune 500 companies as well as cloud service providers, managed service providers and managed hosting providers, we have identified the following five trends for 2023. The increasing importance of cyber resilience and the coupling of storage and cybersecurity are changing the way IT decision-makers are thinking about enterprise storage, going forward.
#1: Convergence of cybersecurity and storage as a cornerstone of an enterprise IT strategy
CIOs and CISOs continue to increasingly realize that, if they don’t combine storage with cybersecurity, they’re leaving a gap in their corporate cybersecurity strategy. IT leaders are accustomed to protecting the network and endpoints, deploying firewalls and looking at the application layer. However, all of their data end up on storage. The great awakening in the enterprise market, heading into the new year, is that, if an enterprise storage solution does not have the capabilities to help combat a cyberattack, the C-suite and the IT team are leaving the organization severely exposed. The trend is for storage that is buoyed by cyber resilience to be part of every comprehensive cybersecurity strategy in every large organization.
#2: Boosting the ability to make a near-instantaneous recovery from a cyberattack with the highest level of trust in the data
The question is not “if” your organization is going to be hit with a cyberattack; it’s a question of “when” and “how often.” Your organization will get attacked, and it could get attacked multiple times. At that point, it’s a matter of how you respond to that attack. Cyber resilience is among the most important and highly demanded requirements of enterprises today to combat cyberattacks across the entire storage estate and data infrastructure.
Even if your endpoint or your network security keeps the cyber criminals out once or twice, there will surely be times when they get through. When that happens, one of the critical things for an IT team is to get a known good copy of the data and make a speedy recovery. It’s crucial to use an immutable snapshot of the data to ensure that the data has not been compromised. In other words, the data can be trusted. Finding a known good copy is done by curating the potential candidates to restore in a fenced forensic environment. The last thing you want to do is just start restoring data that has malware or ransomware infiltrated within it.
#3: Harnessing the capability of anomalous pattern detection to do cyber scanning on secondary storage
We’re seeing a trend emerging more broadly in 2023 around cyber scanning with the ability to do anomalous pattern detection, particularly on secondary storage. In the longer term, we see an expansion onto primary storage over the next 2-3 years. This cyber scanning is another tool in the storage admin’s tool bag, along with cyber resilience, to be proactively strengthening the data infrastructure to handle the ever-increasing sophistication and deceptiveness of cyberattacks. Whether for money, power or perverse entertainment, these attacks are designed to take down your business.
#4: Growing demand for ease of deploying cyber storage, resilience and advanced security technologies
Enterprises and service providers are increasingly seeking easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use solutions that meet their needs for cyber storage resilience and integrated security technologies. They want not only automation, but also the next level up with autonomous automation. End-users don’t want complex set-ups anymore. They want to be able to quickly and efficiently access forensic environments, and when it comes to recovery of data, they expect two or three clicks, and then be done with it.
#5: Cyber resilience is being recognized as necessary for both primary and secondary storage as a safeguard against cyberattacks and internal threats
People often think that cyber storage resilience is only about backing up data. That’s not true. Cyber storage resilience is more than backup. This is an important distinction that speaks to a trend for the next year because smart cyber criminals won’t only attack your secondary datasets, like backup, but also attack your primary datasets. In recognition of this reality, enterprises and service providers are heading into the new year injecting new levels of cyber storage resilience into both their primary and secondary storage environments. There is a shift in the enterprise market starting to happen from being reactive – waiting for the cyber criminals to attack and then doing something about it – to proactively prepare for recovery, likened to disaster recovery. Companies usually have elaborate disaster recovery plans and business continuity measures. There is a growing awareness that “cyber disaster plans” need to be put in place with the right set of capabilities to initiate and execute rapid recovery.
About Eric Herzog
Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat. Prior to joining Infinidat, Herzog was CMO and VP of Global Storage Channels at IBM Storage Solutions. His executive leadership experience also includes: CMO and Senior VP of Alliances for all-flash storage provider Violin Memory, and Senior Vice President of Product Management and Product Marketing for EMC’s Enterprise & Mid-range Systems Division.
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