TALKING

Finally , you need to know what your critical systems are and ensure they have the right levels of availability .

Ransomware – A growing threat

First , unwanted downtime and system outages – the big headline news moments that no organisation wants . This has cost and brand reputation implications but also breaks trust with customers .

We recently conducted some global research on ransomware . The first thing we picked up is that a third of UK respondents had already adopted multi-cloud , which tells us that the UK is more advanced than most of the rest of Europe , at least in adopting multiple clouds .

We found that 64 % of those customers store all or part of their data in the cloud and , on average , the UK has 21 different cloud services , compared to 12 in the rest of Europe . There is also a security gap of technology processes , skills and best practices in cloud in the UK . The results showed 55 % acknowledge that their IT security has not kept pace with the complexity of deploying cloud and infrastructure in general .

Budgets are also tighter in the UK than in other areas . We saw 77 % acknowledge that their budgets will be flat to decline due to COVID , so technology leaders have to do more , with less budget , quite quickly .

Only 5 % said they followed recommendations to protect data against ransomware . The 3-2-1 recommendation is to have three copies of your data in two different locations and make sure one of those locations is air gapped . Interestingly , the UK is the most likely to pay the ransom in a ransomware attack – 56 % would pay in full or partially , versus 43 % globally .

Second , if you ' re not managing your data effectively , you run the risk of breaching regulatory compliance .

Finally , if you don ' t have a well-managed environment for your data , you ’ re typically overspending on data management .

If you get the security posture right and protect your data , you manage your data more effectively and there ’ s a by-product of reducing data management costs .

Data security – A forward view

Looking forward , we ’ re likely to see a continued adoption of multi-cloud and increased complexity of infrastructure . Customers are also increasingly investigating automation in IT – fuelled by cloud deployments . We see discussions around infrastructure as a code and we will see more clouds and an increased risk of complexity .

But we also have an opportunity to build data management and security management into automation .

5G is another key area which is going to accelerate digital experiences , while ransomware is a threat that ’ s likely to grow .

Almost half estimated that if they were attacked by ransomware and infected , it would take five days or more to recover . So , the impact is really high .

There are implications if organisations don ' t reassess their security strategies to make sure that it keeps pace with the complexity in infrastructure .

But the good news is that if you have a good data management and security strategy , and keep all your systems patched , you are probably going to be okay . But if you overlook those areas , you could have some challenges ahead .

Building a unified multi-cloud strategy with resilience at the core

Infrastructures will come and go but I would recommend looking at a data management platform , which should be seen as a service that is independent of the infrastructure .

Veritas has been in the data management industry for almost three decades and we ' ve helped large organisations with complex environments to manage their data effectively with our best-of-breed technology .

Veritas helps organisations migrate to the cloud , protect their workloads on-prem , in the cloud and in multiple clouds , and allows organisations to underpin their critical workloads to make sure they ’ re available with near zero downtime , wherever they are located . p

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