2022 Predictions: Data Agility, Cloud, Cybersecurity, AI and More
Welcome to 2022! We've gathered a compilation of insightful predictions for the next 12 months from Commvault experts. If anyone can provide a lens to the future, it's these seasoned thought leaders.
Isabelle Guis, CMO, Commvault
Enabling and embracing data agility
If we learned anything over the last few years, it's that we live in an ever-changing and unpredictable world. Not only have CIOs rapidly shifted their workforce from in-person to virtual and back again, but they have contended with supply chain issues and ransomware attacks that interrupt business and could potentially paralyze countries and endanger lives.
In just about every conversation I've had with customers, we talk about the importance of keeping options open by supporting on-premises and cloud environments; multiple cloud vendors; and new workloads with the same budget.
That's why Commvault's single platform approach is so valuable to our customers. One Intelligent Data Services platform that supports the broadest ecosystem of apps, workloads, databases, containers, VMs, or on-premises or cloud storage. The ability to turn on multiple data services as needed. And the flexibility to purchase it all as a service or software subscription. These capabilities will define your data management strategy in 2022 and enable your organization to evolve with the market.
Don Foster, Global Vice President of Sales Engineering
Get Ready for Data Integrity Fire Drills
In 2022 CEOs, CFOs, CIOs and other C-Suite executives will begin mandating that their IT teams conduct periodic "fire drills" to test the strength, resilience, and speed of their cyber defense and disaster recovery processes and solutions.
These executives might believe that their organization's IT team has implemented a robust strategy to fend off and, if necessary, recover from ransomware and other attacks. But with the integrity of their business threatened by these attacks, these executives are following the famous old Russian proverb "trust but verify." They might "trust" that their IT Team's strategy will work, they are also "verifying" that it will work as well.
Data integrity fire drills can confirm if an organization's cyberattack defenses are robust or discover weak points in these defenses that cyber criminals might exploit. These drills can also verify that, if a worst-case scenario occurs and data has been locked, altered, or destroyed by an attack, it can be quickly recovered from a secure backup copy - turning what could have been a data disaster into a data speed bump.
Reza Morakabati, Chief Information Officer at Commvault
Enterprises Bring DevOps' Agility to Data Management
Over the next year, enterprises will launch new agile, DevOps-like teams dedicated to optimizing how they manage and use these enterprises' data. These groups - composed of data security, protection, analytics and other types of data experts, along with IT operations staff - will be tasked with quickly and efficiently improving the security, protection, governance, and value of their organization's data.
These DevOps-like agile data teams are needed because, having accelerated their digital transformation initiatives during the pandemic, enterprises now find themselves unable to view or control all the data they have sprawled across dozens of SaaS applications, multiple cloud services, and various types of on-premises infrastructure. They also need agile data teams that shorten cycle times for new data management solution releases, increasing the frequently of these releases so that the enterprises' other IT and business teams can experiment with them and quickly provide feedback on how well they help improve business outcomes.
With these agile data teams in place, they can gain this centralized visibility and control, allowing them to secure this data against attacks from cybercriminals, recover it if a successful cyberattack or other disaster does lock, alter, or destroy it, and move it between SaaS applications, clouds and infrastructures. These teams can also work with business line employees to find new ways to use data analytics, AI, ML and other tools to glean valuable insights for this data that improve their business outcomes.
Those enterprises that create agile data teams next year will be able to continuously optimize how they store, protect, secure, govern, and use their data - allowing them to ensure the fundamental integrity of their business while also liberating them to do amazing things with this data.
Mark Jow, VP Sales Engineering, EMEA
AI and ML Simplify and Strengthen Data Protection
Over the past few years, we have seen sectors that have undergone extensive digital transformation be the targets of cyber-attacks. The early transition of the financial sector to online banking has made it the target of many cyber-attacks in recent years, for example. Similarly, in the past 18 months with the development of the COVID vaccines, the healthcare sector has been increasingly under attack by such cybercriminals. This trend shows that attacks are becoming increasingly calculated and focused. As the sophistication of cybercriminals continues to grow, we can expect to see much more evidence of this in 2022. Ultimately, no sector is immune to cyberattacks - cybercriminals will target any organization that they think is likely to pay a ransom.
"For this reason, every organization regardless of its sector, should be looking into new technologies to simplify and strengthen its data protection services. Over the next 12-24 months, we can expect to see enhancements around Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) which can be a huge asset for such tasks. Expansion into more augmented intelligence will also be hugely beneficial - and therefore we can expect to see it widely adopted - as it can deliver deeper insights into organizations' data at a faster speed than ever experienced before. This will drive greater competitive advantages as well as securing and protecting data against the ever-growing threat landscape."
We hope you enjoy perusing the predictions, and please revisit our blog at https://www.commvault.com/blogs as the year unfolds - we'll keeping a real time record of how these forecasts turn out!
Gloss