Solutions Review editors received data protection predictions from experts for 2023, part of the 4th-annual BUDR Insight Jam.
As part of Solutions Review’s third-annual #BUDRInsightJam, we called for the industry’s best and brightest to share their data protection predictions for 2023. The experts featured here represent the top data protection solution providers with experience in this niche. Data protection predictions have been vetted for relevance and ability to add business value as well. These are the best predictions from the dozens we received. We believe these are actionable and may impact a number of verticals, regions, and organization sizes.
Surya Varanasi, CTO at StorCentric
Data security
“The ransomware threat will continue to grow and become increasingly aggressive – not just from a commercial standpoint, but from a nation-state warfare perspective as well. Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report, reminded us how this past year illustrated, “… how one key supply chain incident can lead to wide ranging consequences. Compromising the right partner is a force multiplier for threat actors. Unlike a financially motivated actor, nation-state threat actors may skip the breach altogether, and opt to simply keep the access to leverage at a later time.” For this reason, channel solutions providers and end-users will prioritize data storage solutions that can deliver the most reliable, real-world proven protection and security. Features such as lockdown mode, file fingerprinting, asset serialization, metadata authentication, private blockchain and robust data verification algorithms, will transition from nice-to-have, to must-have, while immutability will become a ubiquitous data storage feature. Solutions that do not offer these attributes and more won’t come even close to making it onto any organization’s short-list.”
Brian Dunagan, CTO at Retrospect
Data management
“Freedom and flexibility will become the mantra of virtually every data management professional in the coming year. In particular, data management professionals will seek data mobility solutions that are cloud-enabled and support data migration, data replication and data synchronization across mixed environments including disk, tape and cloud to maximize ROI by eliminating data silos. We will likewise see an uptick in solutions that support vendor-agnostic file replication and synchronization, are easily deployed and managed on non-proprietary servers and can transfer millions of files simultaneously – protecting data in transit to/from the cloud with SSL encryption.”
Ransomware
“Ransomware will remain a huge and relentlessly growing global threat, to high profile targets and to smaller SMBs and individuals as well. There are likely a few reasons for this continuing trend. Certainly, one is that today’s ransomware is attacking widely, rapidly, aggressively, and randomly – especially with ransomware as a service (RaaS) becoming increasingly prevalent, looking for any possible weakness in defense. The second is that SMBs do not typically have the technology or manpower budget as their enterprise counterparts.”