3 Trends to Take The Data Protection Market By Storm

2017 has been a spectacular year for Indian small and mid-sized companies. And the year 2018 is going to bring revolutions in the industry. For non-technical business owners, it's enough to make your head spin. To understand the incredible advancements in technology and innovation we spoke to Christophe Bertrand, VP of Product Marketing and Nikhil Korgaonkar, Regional Sales Director India and SAARC, Arcserve.

The Top technology trends that will rule in 2018

We have created a world for ourselves that is networked together, where businesses of all sizes rely on networked systems on premise and increasingly on the cloud. The year 2018 will definitely bring more connectivity, digital transformation initiatives, and more data to companies, however, it has come along with a number of more sophisticated cybersecurity threats, and with the changing technology landscape it has made cybersecurity & ability to access the data to keep the business running the most crucial issues of the tech industry, which needs to be dealt with at most priority.

Christophe Bertrand, VP of Product Marketing at Arcserve

One of the key predictions of 2018 is “Vendor partnerships will lead the fight against ransomware, storage vulnerabilities will become more critical and Data Protection Officers take reign.”

No data is 100% threat proof, however, there are chances to retrieve when such an attack takes place.  Amidst a growing influx of ransomware and the enactment of data privacy regulations, organizations continue to grapple with answers to unplanned downtime and ensuring compliance with laws like GDPR, all the while trying to simplify their IT infrastructures and reduce their storage footprints.

The impact of three trends that will take the data protection market by storm:

• Ransomware - It’ll Take a Village: While businesses of all sizes and consumers alike have ransomware on the brain and are starting to take internal measures to make cybersecurity a priority company-wide, many will continue to be unprepared for outside attacks, which are projected to occur every 14 seconds by the end of 2019, up from every 40 seconds this year according to a Ransomware Damage Report released by Cyber Security Ventures. As businesses look at ways to proactively combat cyber attacks, they’re met with the reality that no single product today has a ransomware “feature.” Instead, partnerships between data security and data protection providers, such as leading consortiums like Ransomware Watch, will become increasingly important to lead the fight against these threats, and organizations should also look for formal partnerships or M&A activity in this space.

• No Data Left Behind - 2018 will be the year of zero tolerance for data loss, largely driven by the 64 percent of data and applications that fall into the mission and business-critical tiers. Organizations will continue to have high expectations around how long it takes to recover their data (RTOs), but because of operational, compliance and customer experience reasons, will also realize that the relevance of their data (RPOs) is as important, if not more, than its timeliness. A recent Osterman Research report found that C-level executives overwhelmingly believe their RTOs and RPOs will shorten significantly in 2018, to values that are, on average, one-half of what they were in 2017. Nearly 50 percent also said they could tolerate no data loss from their most critical applications. Given this trend, organizations will continue to shift from on-premise disaster recovery (DR) strategies to more affordable cloud-based infrastructures that include physical and service-based offerings like disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS), with the market ballooning to nearly $12 billion by 2020. And because these organizations will be increasingly unwilling to accept the loss of business activity, emerging solutions will enable near-zero cloud RPOs without breaking the bank. In short, any size company will be able to avoid IT disasters, making data loss obsolete.

Nikhil Korgaonkar, Regional Sales Director India & SAARC, Arcserve

• GDPR Crosses Borders -  Role of Data Protection Officer Emerges: The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will be the most notable form of compliance in 2018. While it will become EU law in May, it will affect every company that handles data for EU residents, even if the data processing occurs outside EU borders. Organizations will need to take a very close look at how they manage data impacted by new privacy requirements and will need to revisit best practices for backup and archiving, in particular email archiving, to understand how to re-architect processes. One notable development will be the creation of a formal Data Protection Officer role. Look for an emerging crop of solutions with an optimized set of functions that help organizations meet local and global GDPR requirements, yet are easy-to-use and can help those responsible for managing backup and email data quickly identify personal information and remove it from their systems.