Data security to be focus area in 2022

The last few years have witnessed acceleration in the adoption of digital technologies, creating a significant demand for various digital services. This rapid spike is primarily emerging from offices adopting hybrid work models, growing data security concerns and overall business disruptions. In the coming years, we can expect businesses to desire more control of their data, with a greater focus on the ability to facilitate portability and seamless response to the changing demands of the future.

With cloud computing and cloud services, almost everything is still in play. Whether it is tussle between the major global hyperscalers or the several modern scenarios including IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and containers. Each implementation has its own benefits, and each come with their own unique data protection requirements. Here are some key predictions that will dominate the technology industry in 2022 and beyond:

1. Increased emphasis on data protection and data portability will become essential:

Owing to the severe impact of the pandemic, many organizations in India have shifted to a hybrid work environment and the adoption of digital transformation programs has also evidently increased. This has made preserving as well as protecting data even more difficult, throwing down a challenge on Indian organizations to capitalize on this gap and safely utilize data and protect it, while enabling business growth. Evolution of platforms from physical to virtual to cloud to containers, shows that data lives in multiple places, so organizations need the flexibility to protect their data regardless of physical location, hypervisor or application. Irrespective of where a workload is stored, it always needs protection. As consumers are becoming more aware about the significance of data protection, we will continue to witness a spike in the demand for data protection solutions, as per our Veeam Data Protection Trends Report 2021. Organizations are looking at investing in suitable technology solutions and data protection strategies that will help them maintain their performance standard and uphold consumer trust – enabling them to efficiently leverage data of high sensitivity in an appropriate manner.

Likewise, data portability will also certainly be a focus area for many in 2022. With employees returning to work, organizations will work towards providing its users access to data and flawless service experience across cloud environments. Data portability will reduce the friction of data movement and enable cloud acceleration. According to our 2021 Cloud Protection Trends Report, 36 per cent of executives believe that considering portability will be of key essence with WFH opening to hybrid format the ability to move data safely will be a game changer. Ergo, I believe that the coming months will see an increase in businesses emphasizing on accommodating various data protection strategies including increase in frequency of data backups; maintaining data backups at multiple locations (Veeam's 32110 rule); performing regular penetration testing; placing virtual tripwires, creating a data usage policy, etc.

2. With most workloads moving to cloud, cloud-hosted IT delivery models like IaaS, SaaS will gain traction for production and disaster recovery:

While businesses had started implementing cloud before the Covid-19 outbreak, the pandemic has drawn more attention towards its importance and use-cases. In the last 18 months businesses witnessed the urgency to boost their digital transformation journey and understood the growing need to move to cloud services in order to ensure a smooth and secure remote working experience. According to a recent Gartner report, India's cloud market is estimated to reach $5.6 billion by 2022, a 26 per cent YoY growth. The shift to a hybrid work environment has also resulted in employees demanding an efficient, swift and smooth work experiences.

Further, having realized the countless benefits of a cloud-native model businesses are now leveraging this technology for a lateral growth – to enhance their agility, capability, meet the changing demands for 24x7 availability, increase deployment speed, and reduce IT costs. Cloud computing served as a foundation for as-a-service models; however, with IoT (Internet of Things) and edge computing becoming more popular, owing to factors like its ability to create new and improved ways to maximize efficiency, enhance performance and ensure the availability of data with very low latency, we can expect several service-based models to emerge in the near future.

3. Kubernetes/ Containerization will take center stage:

India has seen an increased number of cyberattacks amid a rapid adoption of digital services across the country in last one year. Nearly 1.16 million cases of cyberattacks were reported in 2020, up nearly three times from 2019 according to Indian government data. On an average, 3,137 cyber security related issues were reported every day during the year.

In the same time ransomware attacks increased, adoption of Kubernetes and containers have witnessed significant acceleration and have proven to be beneficial. According to Gartner, 75 per cent of large enterprises in mature economies will have adopted containers by 2024. These trends have augmented modern computing paradigm driven by Kubernetes and containers. Kubernetes is the unifying fabric of modern computing. Using it to mitigate the most pressing data threats in today's risk landscape is one of the best defenses against cyber-attacks. Furthermore, tools for backup and recovery functions promote automation and integrate seamlessly into existing workflows. Enabling immutability, creating backups with unique code paths, protecting backups for maximum effectiveness, and enabling seamless restores are part of a robust ransomware data protection strategy. Kubernetes can help eliminate manual processes and cut infrastructure costs. It makes a container-based architecture feasible across a portfolio of large enterprise apps, which means businesses can get most out of their cloud and hardware investments. Also, it can enable agility across the IT Ecosystem.

Given the rising need for better ransomware practices, streamlined business processes, and business agility, SMEs and their IT personnel will increasingly favor Kubernetes in 2022.

(The author is Managing Director of Veeam Software – India & SAARC)