AI plays a crucial role in enhancing data backup and recovery processes for businesses. As the technology evolves, automating backup and recovery processes is a prerogative for most organizations today.

In fact, AI is capable of making backups more efficient. For example, newer backup technologies use AI and machine learning to automate the ongoing task of backing up critical data and software components. These intelligent tools can be trained by IT engineers to follow priorities and requirements for data security and recovery plans.

MODERN DATA BACKUP CAN HELP IT LEADERS KEEP BUSINESSES RUNNING

Aaron Raj | 26 January, 2023

When it comes to incident response, AI can offer recommendations for actions an incident response team should consider taking. AI also analyzes large amounts of data faster and more objectively than humans, aiding quick decisions during critical minutes after an incident.

More importantly, AI in incident response is capable of automating recovery tasks, such as reinstalling or reconfiguring network servers. For data recovery, machine learning algorithms automate data classification and retrieval, making it easier to prioritize and recover essential business assets. These speed up recovery processes, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity. It ensures that data backups, incident response, and asset recovery work together efficiently.

Simply put, AI enhances data backup and recovery by automating tasks, improving incident response, and ensuring efficient recovery of both business and technology assets.

Introducing Cohesity Gaia, the first-ever AI-powered conversational search assistant.

An AI search assistant in backup and recovery

For businesses, having a backup solution that uses AI is essential in ensuring they are capable of ensuring business continuity. Given the rising number of ransomware cases, paying the ransom should not be seen as a solution.

Instead, businesses should invest in backup solutions that can give them instant recovery should they ever face any cybersecurity incidents. The data retrieval process in recovery should be also be seamless.

DATA MANAGEMENT: BACKUP AND RECOVERY CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN CYBERATTACKS

Aaron Raj | 22 November, 2023

Given this need, Cohesity has unveiled the industry’s first AI-powered enterprise search assistant that brings retrieval augmented generation (RAG) AI and large language models (LLMs) to high-quality backup data within Cohesity environments. Cohesity Gaia is a conversational AI assistant that enables users to ask questions and receive answers by accessing and analyzing their vast pools of enterprise data.

The AI assistant relies on RAG. RAG is a natural language processing technique that combines the benefits of retrieval-based and generative-based approaches to improve the quality of text generation tasks, such as question-answering, summarization, and conversational AI. RAG models combine the strengths of LLMs with the ability to retrieve information from multiple sources. RAG enables LLMs to generate more knowledgeable, diverse, and relevant responses and offers a more efficient approach to fine-tuning these models.

AI in incident response is capable of automating recovery tasks, such as reinstalling or reconfiguring network servers. (Image generated by AI).

According to a media release by Cohesity, the AI search assistant is capable of transforming data into knowledge when coupled with the Cohesity Data Cloud. It can help accelerate the goals of an organization while keeping data secure and compliant.  Cohesity has announced plans with the three largest public cloud providers to bring their LLM services to Cohesity Gaia.

The underlying architecture of Cohesity Data Cloud manages and secures data with a unique blend of performance, extensibility, and scale. Cohesity Gaia extends the value proposition of Cohesity Data Cloud even further:

• By building a RAG AI solution on Cohesity’s multi-cloud platform, Cohesity will be able to seamlessly provide RAG AI conversational search experiences across cloud and hybrid environments that will allow enterprises to gain deeper insights into their data and make informed decisions in the future, no matter where their stored data resides.
• Cohesity maintains a fully indexed backup of all files, across all workloads, and at all points in time. This robust capability supports the creation of AI-ready indexes for rapid conversational search and responses, providing enterprises with quick and accurate results. Initially, Cohesity will support Microsoft 365 and OneDrive data and will expand to more workloads over time.
• The unique architecture of Cohesity Gaia ensures that all indexed data is immediately available for reading without the need for backups to be reconstructed. This allows the Cohesity Data Cloud to function like a data lake, providing businesses with real-time access to their data for analysis and decision-making.
• The Cohesity Data Cloud employs granular, role-based access controls and zero-trust security principles, ensuring that only authorized users and models have access to the necessary data. This not only protects sensitive information but also helps enterprises maintain compliance with various regulatory requirements.

Cohesity Gaia offers a comprehensive solution that caters to the unique requirements of enterprises. (Image generated by AI).

Addressing LLM challenges in backup and recovery

“The narrative surrounding the ease of deploying advanced machine learning systems like RAG can be misleading. While it’s true that modern frameworks and pre-built models have simplified the process to an extent, they often gloss over the complexities that arise when scaling to enterprise levels,” explained Gregg Staton, office of the CTO – data & AI, Cohesity in a blog post. 

Enterprises looking to utilize LLMs often face several challenges. Developers must first create more copies of data, thereby increasing the threat footprint for an attack. What’s more, the data may be incomplete or dated. Finally, this approach requires additional time and resources and puts an added burden on the system’s performance. Cohesity Gaia overcomes these challenges by integrating AI capabilities within a customer’s backup environment.

Cohesity Gaia helps organizations make better, faster decisions across a myriad of use cases, such as:

• To assess an organization’s level of cyber-resilience.
• To quickly perform financial and compliance audit checks.
• To answer complex legal questions.
• To serve as a knowledge base to train new employees.

“Enterprises are excited to harness the power of generative AI but have faced several challenges gaining insights into secondary data, including backup, archived and vaulted data – because every approach requires re-hydrating the data, and painfully waiting weeks for the data to be available for analytics and insights. Cohesity Gaia dramatically simplifies this process with our patent-pending approach using Retrieval Augmented Generation,” said Sanjay Poonen, CEO and president of Cohesity.

WHY BACKUP WILL BE CRITICAL TO CYBERSECURITY IN AUSTRALIA

Aaron Raj | 24 November, 2023

“With Cohesity Gaia, for the first time in our industry, companies will be able to leverage generative AI to query their data in a virtually seamless way. Our approach delivers rapid, insightful results without the drawbacks of more manual and risky approaches. In short, it turns data into knowledge within seconds and minutes,” added Poonen.

At the core of Cohesity AI technologies is Cohesity Turing, a patent-pending collection of AI capabilities and technologies integrated into Cohesity’s multi-cloud data management and security platform, that provide operational and data insights. The foundation of these AI innovations is the concept of “responsible AI,” with capabilities and frameworks that enable customers to introduce AI to backup data securely and safely at scale. All

Cohesity Turing solutions adhere to these responsible AI principles:

• Transparency: Protect access to the data with role-based access controls. Promote transparency and accountability around access and policies.
• Governance: Ensure the security and privacy of data used by AI models and the workforce—so the right data is exposed only to the right people (and models) with the right privileges.
• Access: Integrate indexed and searchable data securely and easily while ensuring data is immutable and resilient.

“It is important to understand that Cohesity Gaia does not retrieve data like a search engine; it answers questions,” added Statton.

”For example, if you notice a rise in costs in a region, typically, you would search for dozens of invoices, review and compare them, and see if you can discover the reason for the cost increases. It could take hours, days, or weeks to resolve. With Cohesity Gaia, you simply ask, ‘Why have costs increased in the region?’ and Cohesity Gaia will pull the relevant information from your stored data, analyze it, and return an answer to your question. It’s that simple.”

The post Retrieval augmented generative AI in backup and recovery appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

One of the best ways of managing and securing data is by ensuring there are sufficient backup capabilities. Organizations that have modern backup solutions are known to have better recovery options should they experience any cybersecurity incidents.

In fact, looking into the cybersecurity strategy in Australia, backup has to be a critical part of it. Businesses in Australia continue to be targeted by cybercriminals. Most of these businesses end up paying the ransom simply because they need access to their systems back, due to the lack of proper backup and recovery options.

MAKING SENSE OF THE AUSTRALIAN CYBER SECURITY STRATEGY

Aaron Raj | 23 November, 2023

According to data points from Rubrik Zero Labs, 64% of Australian IT and security leaders said they would likely pay a ransom to recover their data in the wake of a cyberattack. The report also stated that almost three quarters of Australian respondents (72%) reported having already paid a ransom to recover data or to stop a ransomware attack.

However, most businesses fail to realize that paying the ransom does not necessarily mean they will get access back to their data or not be targeted again. Some cybercriminals can even exploit data to launch further cyberattacks in the future after returning it to companies. Rubrik’s study showed that only 14% of Australian organizations that paid attackers for decryption tools were able to recover all their data.

Australia’s Minister of Cyber Security, Claire O’Neil, outlines the goals of the latest cybersecurity strategy.

While there is no law to stop businesses from paying ransomware, most governments and cybersecurity vendors are strongly against it. Australia’s new strategy also does not push for a ban of paying ransoms, with the country’s Cybersecurity Minister Claire O’Neil stating that the government does not have sufficient coping mechanisms for an outright immediate ban on ransomware payments.

“So my plan for the country on ransoms is that we undertake what is the first two years of this strategy, and then we revisit where we are then and contemplate what I think is inevitable for countries around the world, and that is one day a ban on making ransomware payment. We just can’t feed cybercriminals like this,” O’Neil said on a radio interview following the launch of the strategy.

Backup is critical for cybersecurity in Australia (Image generated by AI).

Backup is key to cybersecurity in Australia

Scott Magill, managing director for Rubrik in Australia and New Zealand, said that gaining greater visibility into the ransoms demanded and paid by Australian businesses seems like a step in the right direction, but in isolation, it will do little to actually protect Australian data.

“We need to ask why we’re requiring organizations to report this? If it’s to stop the flow of money to cyber criminals by implementing a punitive ‘big stick’ to fine those who pay a ransom, then it is a misguided approach. If it’s to gain greater visibility into the scale of the problem, it is only half the solution. We need to think about the outcome we’re striving to achieve and work backward to get to the solution,” said Magill.

WHY ARE STATE-SPONSORED HACKERS TARGETING AUSTRALIA?

Aaron Raj | 16 November, 2023

Magill explained that ideally organizations shouldn’t be paying ransoms because they don’t need to, and that’s the outcome Australia should be aiming for. The Australian Cyber Security Centre’s (ACSC) annual threat report, released last week, showed that the second most common cyber-incident was compromised user credentials. That means that regardless of how high a digital wall is built, motivated attackers will get in. The ACSC report also found the number of cyberattacks against Australian businesses had increased 23%, with one attack reported every six minutes.

“With that in mind, I would urge the government to consider supporting organizations to adopt an ‘assumed breach mindset.’ This involves understanding attackers will eventually be successful, and preparing ahead of time to keep the most critical and sensitive data safe,” explained Magill.

Magill emphasizes the importance of backups, which he feels will be critical to this approach. Proven and fully tested, cyber-resilient backups break the entire ransomware business model, because they allow an organization to rapidly recover data themselves. This drastically minimizes the impact of an attack.

Put simply, rather than be faced with weeks or months offline as the business recovers, the entire process can happen in just minutes or hours, negating the need to pay a ransom.

“The Australian Signal’s Directorate (ASD) already has a framework in place with its regular backup mitigation strategy. One solution could be to mandate regulated industries and critical infrastructure providers to implement this strategy to the highest maturity level. This could easily be woven into current Security of Critical Infrastructure (SOCI) requirements. Further assurance could then be provided by requiring these industries to regularly show evidence of tested recovery times and procedures,” stated Magill.

The post Why backup will be critical to cybersecurity in Australia appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

It’s been an eventful time for Australia recently. While winning the Cricket World Cup may have sparked some joy, the reality is that businesses in Australia are increasingly concerned about the number of cybersecurity incidents happening in the country.

Despite the government making changes to cybersecurity laws and businesses investing heavily in their cyber defenses, cybercriminals are still finding ways to infiltrate systems and wreak havoc on Australian businesses.

WHY ARE STATE-SPONSORED HACKERS TARGETING AUSTRALIA?

Aaron Raj | 16 November, 2023

The recent DP World cyberattack, affecting several ports in Australia, highlights how vulnerable systems can be. The cyberattack forced the company to stop operations for a few days. Although the port has now resumed operations, the incident raised several questions.

One particular question arises about the importance of strong backup and recovery plans. Could the downtime have been reduced if the company had had a well-planned backup and recovery option?

Australia’s Minister for Cyber Security is focused on improving the country’s cybersecurity.

To understand more about this, we caught up Michael Alp, managing director for Australia and New Zealand at Cohesity.

TWA: Could an efficient data management system have reduced the damage these companies faced and are organizations paying the ransom because they don’t have sufficient backup?  

Michael Alp, managing director for Australia and New Zealand for Cohesity.

Firstly, it’s important to note that the complete details of the DP World cyberattack have not yet been fully disclosed. However, the occurrence of the attack is not surprising, given that businesses now operate in a world where cyberattacks are a matter of when, not if.

In fact, when we polled 509 Australian & New Zealand IT and security decision-makers (split 50:50) in our 2023 State of Data Security & Management survey, 56% said their organization had been a victim of ransomware in the six months prior to being surveyed, and 95% felt the threat of ransomware to their industry had increased in 2023 compared to 2022.

That means it’s also unsurprising that 71% of respondents lack full confidence in their company’s ability to recover data and critical business processes after a system-wide cyberattack. This finding underscores both the necessity of cyber-resilience and the challenges in establishing or maintaining it.

Cyber-resilience is the ability to continue delivering business outcomes and generating revenue, even in the face of an adverse cyber-event. When a malicious attack occurs, it’s not just a business’s technology, people, or processes that are tested, but their cyber-resilience, due to its crucial role in ensuring business continuity in the digital world.

While efficient backup alone wouldn’t have prevented DP World’s cyberattack, modern data security and management capabilities might have helped either prevent the attack or limit its impact. These capabilities could have enabled quicker recovery, contributing to cyber-resilience. Notably, the reported cause of the attack was a failure to patch a vulnerability, a fundamental cybersecurity measure.

Modern data security and recovery technology provides organizations with critical capabilities like encryption and immutability, ensuring data integrity. It also enables the detection of attacks and compromises in real-time through AI and ML anomaly detection, and integrations with third-party security solutions, as well as facilitating automated rapid recovery and instant mass restore at scale.

However, if our survey data is anything to go by, there is still a significant journey that organizations must undertake to establish cyber-resilience and adopt the modern data security and recovery technology that today’s threat landscape demands.

95% of ANZ respondents to our survey revealing their organization would consider paying a ransom if it meant being able to recover data and restore business processes. This, coupled with more than 4 in 5 saying their organization would need four or more days to recover data and restore business processes if a cyberattack occurred, certainly suggests that cyber-resilience and data recovery gaps are leading to organizations paying, or at least considering paying, ransoms.

Gantry cranes are seen behind signage for ports operator DP World at an entrance to the Port Botany compound in Sydney on November 13, 2023. (Photo by DAVID GRAY / AFP)

TWA: Is paying the ransom cheaper than going through backup and recovery?  

According to Gartner, the average cost of a ransomware attack is 10 to 15 times the ransom demand, a concerning statistic for companies considering ransom payment as a fallback option in the event of a cyberattack.

Given that the average ransom demanded globally has risen from US$812,380 in 2022, to US$1,542,333 in 2023, according to the Sophos State of Ransomware 2023 report, this means that simply paying a ransom as a reactive countermeasure is likely to not be nearly as cost-effective as proactively procuring the right cybersecurity, data security, and data recovery capabilities that allow you to recover without paying the ransom.

THE AU$5 BILLION PLEDGE FROM MICROSOFT TO REINFORCE AUSTRALIAN CYBERSECURITY

Muhammad Zulhusni | 31 October, 2023

It is up to each business to determine if paying a ransom is an acceptable option. However, there will be some companies that are forced to make this decision in response to an adverse cyber-event because they do not have the right cyber-resilience capabilities in place to refuse the ransom, or because there is a gap in their cyber-resilience strategy.

There are multiple reasons why paying a ransom is a bad and ineffective response, including:

• It does not guarantee that you will recover all your data and restore your business processes to their prior state.
• Often, the data when returned is either so corrupted, encrypted irrevocably, or misaligned, that it requires a ‘professional services’ fee to be paid to malicious actors to help you reinstall it.
• Malicious actors may return only parts of your business-critical data and demand a second or even third ransom payment; some malicious actors leave backdoors or malware to make a secondary compromise easier.
• Ultimately, some of the ransom payment will be used to fund a strike on another business.

As many countries consider banning ransom payments, relying on them instead of cyber-resilience is not a sustainable long-term strategy for recovery from cyberattacks.

According to Gartner, the average cost of ransomware is 10 to 15 times the actual ransom demand (Image generated by AI).

TWA: What are reasonable recovery times for any business experiencing a cybersecurity incident?  

It’s vital for businesses to understand that recovering from a cyberattack isn’t just about retrieving data; it’s about restoring business processes. This is crucial because a cyberattack compromises not only data but also a business’s operational ability, making attacks like ransomware particularly destructive.

Before determining an acceptable recovery timeframe—a period during which downtime can significantly impact revenue, brand reputation, and customer trust—it’s crucial for businesses to identify the data critical to their operations and assess its sensitivity, considering whether its compromise or theft would halt their business.

CAN EFFICIENT DATA MANAGEMENT EASE DATA BACKUP?

Aaron Raj | 1 April, 2022

By pre-emptively assessing these data risks, a business ensures two things:

• Firstly, that this data can be backed up and made recoverable, and that it can test its data recovery and business processes restoration plan.
• Secondly, that it can determine what additional capabilities it may require or where the gaps exist in its data recovery strategy.

However, while a business should aim to be back up and running as soon as possible after a cyberattack, IT outage, or other disaster event, this is not nearly as simple as it sounds. When asked ‘How long would your organization take to recover data and business processes if a cyberattack occurred’ – in our 2023 Data Security and Management survey – over 99% of ANZ respondents revealed they would need over 24 hours, 80% said they would need more than four days, and almost half (47%) of respondents said over a week would be required.

This not only demonstrates the cyber-resilience and data recovery challenges that many organizations are facing, but also raises the question for businesses: how long can I afford to be offline? And for their customers: how long could I accept for a company to be offline before it affected my willingness to become or remain a customer?

These questions should guide businesses in defining a reasonable recovery timeframe and serve as criteria to measure the effectiveness of their cyber-resilience strategies and data security and management capabilities.

It is vital for businesses to recognize that it’s not simply about recovering data, it’s about recovering data to restore business processes. (Image generated by AI).

TWA: Can AI play an important role in data management, especially for backup and recovery for cybersecurity incidents? 

Death and taxes used to be the only two certainties in life. With the current business and cyberthreat landscape, cyberattacks are now very much a third.

In fact, in our 2023 State of Data Security & Management Report, 79% of Australian respondents (402) revealed they were concerned about their organization’s cyber-resilience strategy being able to ‘address today’s cyber-challenges and threats.’ Given this sentiment, for many organizations, there are clearly improvements that can be made to their cyber-resilience strategies, and data security, management, and recovery capability gaps to address.

It is vital that organizations can protect and secure their data, detect cyberthreats such as ransomware, and respond or recover rapidly when the worst occurs. The good news is that not only are these capabilities provided by modern data security and management platforms, but many of these capabilities are also now being enhanced by AI or made possible by AI. These include:

• AI & ML powered anomaly detection: to help monitor data and detect when anomalous changes are made to data, such as size or format, which typically indicate malicious activity is taking place or has taken place. This technology can recognize these patterns, triggering an alert that allows IT and security teams to act fast and respond to a compromise before it becomes a widespread attack, or limit its blast radius.
• AI-enabled multifactor authentication (MFA): the strong importance of MFA is well-documented because of its ability to defend against password cracking and brute-force methods. With AI, MFA can be enhanced to account for behavior (such as typing speed), become adaptive (requiring multiple authentications based on data risk), or detect fraud (automatically blocking a user if their access strays beyond normal boundaries).
• AI system behavior tracking: near real-time monitoring of privileged and administrative users to indicators of anomalous activity.
• AI-enabled ransomware detection: AI can analyze network traffic or file access to identify activity that could indicate a ransomware attack is imminent or in progress, including by ingesting threat intelligence from external threat feeds that help pre-identify IOC indicators.
• AI-enabled activity and behavior monitoring: AI can look at access and user behavior and determine if the activity is suspicious and could signal a ransomware attack: failed login attempts, excessive file access, or other activity that is out-of-band of established norms could be indications of ransomware activity. Activity monitoring can establish norms for both user and application behavior based on continuously analyzing activity logs with AI.
• AI-enabled optimized scheduling: based on the critical need and usage of data, seasonality, and other variables, AI can adjust and optimize backup schedules to ensure recovery point objectives (RPOs) are always met.
• AI retirement of inactive data: as part of the backup process, AI can help organizations determine what data has become dormant for archive. This helps reduce recovery time by eliminating the unnecessary recovery of unused data as well as creating efficiency and cost reduction in storage.

The post Data management: backup and recovery can make a difference in cyberattacks appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The transition from tape to disc to fully digitized formats in the industry for one has definitely created a demand not only for better storage solutions but also for backup and recovery services that are capable to work at faster speeds. This meant that the media and entertainment industry would look to leverage the cloud to provide it with the data storage solutions needed.

To cope with these challenges, media and entertainment companies needed to also adopt backup and recovery solutions that can ensure the availability, integrity, and security of their data assets. These solutions should enable them to:

• Protect their data from loss or corruption due to human error, hardware failure, natural disaster, or malicious attack. Data loss can have devastating consequences for the industry, such as reputational damage, legal liability, lost revenue, and missed deadlines.
• Restore their data quickly and efficiently in case of a disaster or outage. Downtime can be costly for the industry, as it can disrupt production workflows, affect customer satisfaction, and compromise competitive advantage.
• Leverage their data for business value by enabling data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. These technologies can help the industry gain insights, optimize operations, enhance creativity, and improve customer experience.

While adopting the cloud was not a big problem for most organizations in the media and entertainment industry, making the right choices on how to use the cloud was still a big challenge.

There is no denying that streaming platforms and cloud-native media and entertainment organizations were able to make the most of the cloud. From programming to storage, these companies had the right tools and were able to provide customers with what they needed.

69% of media and entertainment companies have been using cloud storage for three years or less. (Image source – Shutterstock)

The digitalization of the media and entertainment industry

However, for traditional media and entertainment companies, the transition was a challenge. Yet they were not giving up. According to a survey by Wasabi Technologies, while media and entertainment organizations are still relatively new to cloud storage (69% of respondents had been using cloud storage for three years or less), public cloud storage use is on the rise, with 89% of respondents looking to increase (74%) or maintain (15%) their cloud services.

Michael King, Vice President GM Asia Pacific and Japan at Wasabi Technologies.

The survey, commissioned by Wasabi in late 2022 involved 1,000 IT decision-makers including 140 from the media and entertainment industry with the aim of understanding how media owners leverage cloud storage as part of their overall IT strategy.  

Survey findings highlighted respondents stating they allocate 13.9% of their IT budgets to public cloud storage services, on average. However, overdrawn budgets due to hidden fees, alongside cybersecurity and data loss concerns, remain problematic for media and entertainment organizations.

“When it comes to storage in the media and entertainment industry, it is really primed for moving to the cloud. And it is not only in the entertainment space. The change of the consumers who are using more OTT, and content in social media, the amount of video and the amount of data that needs to be consumed, is almost beyond the point of having an on-premises model. At the same time, the pandemic created a new work environment.

So, it’s a segment that has lots of integral players. But it’s very strong in terms of having the point solutions. And I think where we see is there’s increased collaboration across that ecosystem to deliver things for customers. Storage is a fundamental part of it and there are the components around it to make it really all work,” explained Michael King, Vice President GM Asia Pacific and Japan at Wasabi Technologies.

Wasabi Technologies is cloud storage partner for Liverpool FC.

Data storage in backup and recovery for content

King also pointed out that the media and entertainment industry does not only mean broadcast and entertainment companies. It in fact refers to any company that has content that needs to be backed up.

For example, in the sports industry, King mentioned that a lot of teams are moving to a digitalization process whereby Wasabi is the backend infrastructure for not only storing the videos but also trying to edit them and make them available in a cost-effective way. Some of Wasabi’s clients include Liverpool FC and Boston Red Sox. In Asia, King also highlighted that Wasabi is currently in conversation with several local sporting teams.

“I think we’re seeing next besides the TV stations and movie studios; production houses are also looking at really moving from tape to digital content. With digitalization, they can monetize the data as well,” added King.

King’s views echo the findings of the survey. Media and entertainment respondents have indicated increasing their public cloud storage budgets in the next 12 months. They cited new data security, backup and recovery requirements as the top reason driving the increase, compared to the global average where security ranked third.

Interestingly, almost half (45%) of media and entertainment organizations reported using more than one public cloud provider. Data security requirements were one of the top reasons why these organizations were choosing a multi-cloud strategy, ranking a close second (44%) to different buying centers within the organization making their own purchase decisions (47%).

Responses show a strong indication of cloud services growth over the next 12 months. (Source – Wasabi Technologies)

Moreover, the top three biggest security concerns media and entertainment organizations have with public cloud include:

• Lack of native security services (42%)
• Lack of native backup, disaster, and data protection tools and services (39%)
• Lack of experience with cloud platforms or adequate security training (38%)

“Attacks are everywhere. And recently, there’s been cyberattacks targeting the media and entertainment space. We think it’s fundamental to have multiple copies of backup. It’s not just having copies in multiple locations but having immutability and object where people can touch and edit,” said King.

Globally, cyberattacks in the media and entertainment industry have been increasing. A recent example would be the vulnerability in MOVEit file transfer program, whereby the BBC was a victim. Another example involved Singapore’s Mediacorp whereby 14,000 meconnect users had their login credentials compromised.

The most famous cyber attack in the media and entertainment industry involved Sony Pictures in 2014. The film company suffered a high-profile cyber attack that resulted in the theft and release of sensitive company information, including employee data and unreleased films. The attack was attributed to North Korean hackers and caused significant damage to Sony Pictures’ reputation and finances.

Wasabi Technologies: The hottest cloud data storage

For King, the industry needs to have affordable data storage for all content in the cloud, from raw footage to finished product, securely archived and be able to get access to it at a moment’s notice.

“If you look at Wasabi, there’s really three key selling points. One is price competitiveness. But it’s not just the initial price. It’s really our fundamental pricing structure strategy is we have no egress or no ingress charges. There’s no vendor lock-in as well. And it’s not only cost competitive, but it’s predictable.

One of the things we’re hearing from the customers is that it’s not only the price, but it’s the predictability of the price. At the end of the month, they know what the price will be. And so that’s a huge component of us. Our breakthrough hot cloud storage technology enables us to offer one simple, single tier of service that’s blazingly fast yet at only 1/5^th the cost of AWS S3, Google Cloud, or Microsoft Azure.

The next is the performance, the speed, the reliability, especially in the entertainment industry. They have large files and we make sure that they have the right latency, and they have the data in the right place, as well as have the right partnerships in place.

The third is the protection or more toward the cost or the predictability. The cost is important, not only for the customer but for the partner. We don’t really sell direct, but we go through partners. And we provide partners the margin to be able to provide that solution to their customers,” commented King.

With that said, the media and entertainment industry should evaluate their backup and recovery needs and choose the best solution that suits their budget, infrastructure, and objectives. By doing so, they can ensure the protection and recovery of their data assets and leverage them for business value.

The post Data storage for the media and entertainment industry appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

At some point in one’s personal life or professional life, they have likely lost data or have fallen victim to data theft.

World Backup Day 2023 is a great opportunity to take a more pragmatic approach to the best practices an organization should adopt to minimize and protect valuable data – and turn this into growing statistics. We challenge businesses to look at it as a numbers game. Keeping the refreshed 2023 outlook in mind, here are a few important numbers to take in and motivate everyone to do the best with their backups.

The 3-2-1 Rule

This isn’t new or broken, but needs a refresh given the current state of cyberthreats and ransomware attacks. The 3-2-1 Rule is a great data management principle that states there should be 3 (or more) copies of data on 2 (or more) different media, with at least 1 of those being off-site. This is great as it doesn’t prescribe any particular hardware technology and it prepares you for nearly every failure scenario, if you combine this rule with the best practices below.

99.999999999% Durability

Object storage has been designed for at least 99.999999999% annual durability, and that should be very appealing to many in the market today. Cloud and object storage is not new, but it has clearly proven scale, durability, and availability in the market. It’s now time that object storage takes a serious stake in the 3-2-1 Rule as well.

Rick Vanover, Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam

85% of businesses have experienced ransomware

The Veeam Ransomware Trends Report 2022 indicated that the majority (85%) of businesses experienced at least 1 ransomware incident in the last year. It’s not if or when anymore, but how many times.

How do we put all of this together for World Backup Day 2023? Businesses should build on the capabilities available in the market while recognizing the realities of the threats today. Ransomware is a disaster that, by the numbers, is much more likely to hit than a fire, or a flood. Let’s take one of the more resilient storage types, object storage, and leverage one of the more unique aspects of its value: immutability.

GUARDIANS OF DATA BACKUP: EXPERTS SHARE STRATEGIES ON WORLD BACKUP DAY 2023

Muhammad Zulhusni | 31 March, 2023

On this World Backup Day 2023, double down on the 3-2-1 Rule with the two non-production copies of backup data on immutable targets, quite possibly with both of them being object storage. Imagine a 3-2-1 rule implementation where both separate copies were immutable object storage. How resilient is that?

You may wonder, how do we address the logical requirement of 1 copy off-site? We could go to the cloud from on-premises (inherently off-site); we could use different cloud regions (definitely off-site) from the two copies; we could use different availability zones and cloud subscriptions (logically off-site and abstracted). The cloud and object storage world bring so much more to the equation for designing a more resilient 3-2-1 Rule – there is now no reason we can’t have a highly resilient backup infrastructure that provides a high likelihood of being able to recover data in a ransomware incident.

The views in the article are those of the author and may not reflect the views of this publication. 

The post World Backup Day 2023: A numbers game   appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

As reliance on data continues to grow, cybercriminals are seizing opportunities to exploit weaknesses and profit from the digital assets of others. A report from Crucial reveals that the global average cost of data breaches increased by over 2.5% in 2022 due to a rise in cyberattacks.

In 2022, Russia emerged as the most targeted country, experiencing over 50.4 million breaches during the first three quarters. Following Russia, China ranked second with 18.2 million data breaches, while Indonesia took the fourth spot with 14.5 million breaches.

MODERN DATA BACKUP CAN HELP IT LEADERS KEEP BUSINESSES RUNNING

Aaron Raj | 26 January, 2023

The report also emphasizes the various forms of cybercrime, with the most frequent type of attack, making up 19%, being the theft or compromise of credentials. Phishing attacks, in which fraudulent emails or messages from perpetrators pose as legitimate businesses, are likewise widespread, representing 16% of cyberattacks. These attacks are not only common but also the priciest for businesses, with an average cost of US$4.91 million. Third-party software vulnerabilities account for 13% of attacks, and can lead to substantial financial losses for businesses, averaging US$4.55 million.

This year’s World Backup Day highlights the urgent need for robust data protection strategies to counter the ever-growing threats posed by cybercriminals and ensure the security and integrity of our digital lives.

Strategies for World Backup Day 2023

Crucial has provided several recommendations for protecting data from various types of breaches, tailored for individuals and businesses. For individuals, creating complex and unique passwords, using two-factor authentication, regularly updating apps and antivirus software, and verifying a company’s security guidelines when asked for information are all essential steps.

For businesses, it’s crucial to identify critical data and evaluate access and activity, establish and update security procedures, educate employees on data protection best practices, encrypt data (especially when sending confidential information via email), and employ a data loss prevention (DLP) solution to quickly identify suspicious data transfers.

Tech Wire Asia has reached out to several regional tech leaders to discuss the importance of organizations reassessing their security strategies and to explore the best practices that these organizations can implement.

Mike Anderson, Global CIO at Netskope

With World Backup Day upon us, it’s important to understand the power of keeping your most precious data safe and protected. As you likely already know, cloud is the predominant means for transferring and sharing data in many organizations today. A recent CSA study found that cloud storage apps were the most popular avenue for sharing data. Because your data is now everywhere, beyond just your traditional data centers and hard drives, ensuring your backups of sensitive data in the cloud are secure means a strong data protection strategy, implementing zero trust principles, is paramount.

Andy Ng, Vice President and Managing Director of Asia Pacific and South Region at Veritas Technologies

According to the Singapore Police Force (SPF), Singapore has seen a 25.2% increase in scams and cybercrimes last year. The country is still seeing many more online crimes, with phishing and e-commerce scams amongst the top 5 most common tactics.

In a recent Veritas survey of 2,000 US consumers, nearly half (48%) said they don’t trust the governments and businesses to adequately back up their digital information so it can be recovered after a ransomware attack. Consumer concern is high, and the threat landscape continues to evolve with faster and more complex threats targeting on-premises and multi-cloud environments.

Here are some best practices to incorporate for a secure and cost-effective data backup strategy:

• Start the backup process with comprehensive data classification and implement deduplication. Organizations should implement comprehensive classification systems to understand the kinds of data they have, where and how it should be stored, and for how long. Implementing identification, categorization, and retention policies will help organizations organize their data and ensure that critical and sensitive data is retained appropriately. Also, they can reduce their attack surfaces by establishing policies, technologies, and auditing that reduce their data footprint through methodologies like deduplication.
• Double down on backup at the edge. Organizations often don’t apply the same level of protection to the edge as they do in the data center, often due to skills and staffing shortages. Each edge device needs to be protected and backed up, and the resulting edge data needs to be assessed, categorized, and protected accordingly.
• Automation is key to secure and cost-effective backup and recovery. AI-based methodologies and technologies that automate provisioning, lifecycle optimization, and smart usage of resources like storage are necessary to keep up with these challenges, and they free up IT staff to focus on more strategic and transformational activity.

Source – Shutterstock

Sunny Chua, Singapore General Manager at Wasabi Technologies

Business leaders should ask themselves whether their organization is prepared for data loss and how fast they could restore business-critical applications in an emergency. Have they recently tested their disaster recovery plans? Are these tests frequent enough? Have these strategies proven enough to protect their data for today’s digital climate?

Considerations that will ensure holistic backup policies are:

• Tapping on cloud backup solutions: using physical media or a secondary data center for air-gapped data protection is rarely practical, costly, and labor-intensive to achieve and adds days to the recovery process. Leading data backup vendors now recommend cloud storage as a simple and more affordable alternative.
• Ensuring the use of backup solutions that enable speed of access and immutability: especially with the ransomware threats that businesses in the Asia-Pacific are more prone to, cloud storage solutions that offer object lock and immutability can enable businesses with both agility and resilience in the face of attacks, which will aid them significantly in preventing costly downtimes.
• Rethinking legacy strategies like the 3-2-1 backup rule: as widely known as it is, the beloved 3-2-1 rule is no longer sufficient for businesses to secure all of their data. Instead, a more robust security practice for modern businesses is the 3-2-1-1-0 rule: three copies of your data on two different media, one off-site, one immutable copy, and zero for zero errors by making sure the air-gapped backups are fully functional.

David Rajoo, ASEAN Systems Engineering Head, Cortex at Palo Alto Networks

The recent report from Palo Alto Networks shows that data exfiltration and leakage were reported in 70% of attacks last year, up by 30% in 2021. Organizations are also pressured to pay ransom by aggressive harassment campaigns 20 times more often than in 2021. In conjunction with this World Backup Day, it’s time for businesses and individuals to re-evaluate their data protection strategy and back up their digital treasure in case of any incident.

A comprehensive backup strategy is crucial in protecting valuable data, especially for businesses that depend on data to run their operations.

In the absence of a reliable backup, organizations may suffer long-lasting consequences. To minimize data loss risks and enable reliable data recovery, organizations must move away from traditional backup solutions and embrace object, a new type of data storage architecture designed to store and retrieve large amounts of unstructured data while being inherently scalable and immutable. This also means that once the data is written to the disk, it cannot be modified or deleted, making it more difficult for malicious actors to tamper with your critical data.

In addition to using multiple backup options, here are some important practices for CIOs’ considerations:

• Using a Zero Trust least privilege access model to consistently control and monitor users’ activities, where users are only granted access based on their job responsibilities at a given timeframe.
• Adopting automated threat detection and security alerts driven by AI and machine learning to identify threat actors’ activities at their early stage.
• Practicing a Zero Trust approach: “Never trust, always verify” to eliminate implicit trust and validate users’ activities continuously at every stage of digital interaction.
• Implementing multi-factor authentication besides email to verify users’ access and better oversee/manage third-party applications.
• Applying a data science approach that powers user behavior analytics to learn how users interact with data and determine earlier if there are suspicious behaviors or irregularities that could lead to a data breach event.

Source – Shutterstock

Wee Tee Lim, regional vice president for SEA and Taiwan, Cloudera 

Many organizations today continue to struggle with how to effectively manage, govern, and secure their data. Establishing strong data privacy and governance policies is important to reduce data exposure and regulatory risk.

There are two sides to data privacy and governance – categorizing sensitive data and ensuring it doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. A defense-in-depth approach, which involves the coordinated use of multiple security countermeasures to protect valuable data, is crucial to tackling security risks. This means that if one mechanism fails, others step up immediately to thwart an attack.

Brett Chase, Systems Engineering Leader,  at Cohesity Asia Pacific & Japan

Establishing and maintaining cyber resilience – the ability to continue to deliver business outcomes, operations, or generate revenue despite suffering an adverse cyber event – relies on having a backup and recovery approach that works when the worst occurs. Without cyber resilience, organizations bring into question their business continuity in the digital world of today and in an era where cyberattacks are no longer a case of ‘if’ but ‘when’.

Organizations can set themselves up for success by focusing their backup strategy on what data is vital for them to continue to operate and the level of sensitivity of this data that if leaked, stolen, or encrypted would significantly disrupt their ability to operate. If the exploitation of this data will cause major impacts, then it is valuable to malicious actors and is susceptible to exploitation or exfiltration.

It is crucial organizations know if this data can be recovered by their data recovery technology without a full data restore, whether their backups are immutable, if their data is encrypted in transit and at rest, if backups can only be accessed by those with specific roles or privileges, and if their backups can meet a predetermined recovery point or time targets

The post Guardians of data backup: Experts share strategies on World Backup Day 2023 appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The frequency and severity of cyberattacks have dramatically increased in recent years, leaving businesses and individuals vulnerable to financial loss and reputational damage. As technology continues to advance and with the ever-present threat of cyberattacks, this has led to a growing need for cybersecurity insurance.

Cyber insurance was created in the late 1990s when organizations began moving their businesses online. As many business leaders sought to understand the complexities of the digital world, insurance policies came in to mitigate the risks associated with the internet and protect companies against unauthorized access to an organization’s systems and data.

The earliest form of cyber insurance was policies that were often broad in scope and not specifically tailored to fit the needs of organizations. However, as the number of cyberattacks increased, so did the nature of cyber insurance. Today, business leaders can opt for highly specialized insurance policies that cover a wide range of risks, including ransomware, data breaches, and business interruption.

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Muhammad Zulhusni | 11 January, 2023

In the Asia Pacific region, the adoption of cyber insurance is expected to grow by 35.5% CAGR during the forecasted period of 2019 – 2025. While artificial intelligence, robotics, virtual reality, and the Internet of Things have proliferated technological advancements, this has led to new parameters of threat. Cyber insurance is expected to provide financial compensation and cover a business’s responsibility for data.

Dave Russell, Vice President of Enterprise Strategy, Veeam

It is important to remember that cyber insurance is not meant to be a standalone solution. As attacks can vary in severity, cyber insurance also varies in premium prices, which can go up to millions. According to a report by S&P, the global cyber cover premium pool is expected to rise by an average of 25 percent annually. There are ranging degrees to the extent that an organization can insure for. For first-party coverage, it would typically cover the cost of things such as the investigation of the incident, loss of revenue due to business interruption, risk assessment for future cyber incidents, ransomware attack payments based on coverage limits, and notifying affected customers. Third-party or cyber liability coverage can be purchased to protect a business if a third-party sues for damages from a cyberattack incident. This can cover legal fees, settlements, and regulatory fines for noncompliance.

The complexity of cyber insurance policies and the nature of the coverage a company provides can make it a daunting task for businesses keen on acquiring coverage. This can be a challenge for smaller enterprises that may lack the knowledge or resources to purchase an adequate policy. In addition, with the rise of cyberattacks, disputes may arise in the aftermath of an attack, with insurance companies and organizations debating on the payout. This can lead to a lengthy and costly legal battle.

While cyber insurance has been around since the 1990s, it is still a relatively new concept that continues to be updated based on new methods of cyberattack. There is a lack of standardization among insurance companies, and more has to be done to ensure that a regulatory standard is adhered to in terms of what can be covered.

Organizations are often targeted for various reasons, with financial gain being the most common motivation. Attackers use a variety of ways to access sensitive information, from phishing through to hacking into systems to extract sensitive information. 

Cyber insurance makes up only one part of practising good cyber resiliency. While it provides financial relief, it does not eliminate the fact that a cyberattack took place, and that the trust of the organization has been compromised. Beyond encrypting sensitive data, installing cybersecurity software and regular staff education around cyberattacks, backing up data is a good way to ensure that there is business continuity in the event of an attack, and that hackers will not have the power to demand money from organizations to get their data back.

Rick Vanover, Senior Director of Product Strategy, Veeam

Data should always be backed up using the 3-2-1-1-0 rule, where there should be three copies of data on two different media, with one copy being offsite, and another being offline, air-gapped or immutable, achieving zero errors with a recovery system. This will safeguard data and ensure that if a company goes offline, it can be quickly restored with little to no downtime. According to Veeam’s recent Data Protection Trends report, 82 percent of organizations have an ‘Availability Gap’ between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back. A further 79 percent cite a “Protection Gap” between how much data they can lose and how frequently IT protects their data across cloud and on-premise. This further highlights the importance of how many backup copies one should have. 

Ultimately, strong backup is the insurance that organizations need. Cyber insurance can be part of an overall plan, but solely relying on it will not be wise. As the technology landscape continues advancing and growing, companies need to lead their own defense against cyberattacks.

The views in the article are those of the authors and may not reflect the views of this publication. 

The post Is cyber insurance a must-have? appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Even before a report of a cyberattack is made, businesses will ensure their backup system is running. In fact, businesses having a well-planned data backup and recovery process on the cloud can keep the business running despite a cyberattack. While some legacy backup systems, like tape backup, are considered more secure by a few, these systems could take some time to get online and recover the system.

According to Veeam’s Data Protection Trends Report, companies today are challenged with more complex hybrid IT environments and are raising budgets to fend off cyberattacks as well as keep up as production environments continue to diversify across various clouds. The result is that IT leaders feel they aren’t sufficiently protected. The top priority of organizations this year is improving the reliability and success of backups, followed by ensuring that Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS) protection is equitable to the protection they rely on for datacenter-centric workloads.

COMPLEXITIES HINDERING BACKUP AND DISASTER RECOVERY CAPABILITIES?

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Highlights from Veeam’s report show that businesses needed modern data protection to keep their business running. According to the survey, organizations are looking for a modern data protection solution that can integrate data protection within a cyber preparedness strategy.

The report showed that in the Southeast Asia and Korea region, only 22% of businesses experienced no ransomware attacks in 2022 with 16% experiencing four or more attacks in 2022. In fact, 39% of organizations stated that ransomware (including prevention and remediation) was the biggest hindrance to Digital Transformation or IT modernization initiatives, due to its burden on budgets and manpower. As startling as those statistics are, the global results of the attacks are even worse.

When organizations were asked about their most significant attacks in 2022:
• 39% of their entire production data set was successfully encrypted or destroyed
• Only 55% of the encrypted/destroyed data was recoverable

The need for modern data backup and recovery

Thus, it is no surprise that when asked what organizations were looking for in a modern data protection solution, their most common response of a modern data protection solution is the “integration of data protection within a cyber preparedness strategy.”

Yet, the report stated that four out of five organizations believe that they have a gap, or a sense of dissatisfaction or anxiety, between what their business units expect and what IT services can deliver. 82% have an ‘Availability Gap’ between how quickly they need systems to be recoverable and how quickly IT can bring them back. 79% cite a ‘Protection Gap’ between how much data they can lose and how frequently IT protects their data. These gaps are one reason that 57% of organizations expect to change their primary data protection in 2023, as well as the justification for increased data protection budgets.

However, increasing budgets should not mean businesses reduce their data protection. While organizations are expected to raise their data protection budget by 6.5% in 2023 in other areas of IT. Of the 85% of organizations planning on increasing their data protection budgets, their average planned increase is 8.3% and often alongside increased investments in cybersecurity tools.

Due to its burden on budgets and manpower, ransomware and the current volatile cybersecurity landscape are taking priority for IT teams. This is causing IT resources and budgets originally allocated toward Digital Transformation initiatives to pivot to cyber prevention. Not only do cyberattacks drain operational budgets from ransoms to recovery efforts, but they also reduce organizations’ ability to modernize for their future success; instead, they must pay for prevention and mitigation of the status quo.

At the same time, with containers becoming mainstream, the approach to data protection needs to change. 52% of respondents are currently running containers, while 40% of organizations are planning to deploy containers – and yet, most organizations are merely protecting the underlying storage, instead of holistically protecting the workloads themselves. This is typical as new production platforms enter the mainstream, followed by the recognition that legacy methods are insufficient, thereby creating an opportunity for third-party backup tools to ensure comprehensive protection.

Danny Allen, CTO and Senior Vice President of Product Strategy at Veeam states that IT leaders are facing a dual challenge, especially since they are building and supporting increasingly complex hybrid environments, while the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks increase.

“This is a major concern as leaders think through how they mitigate and recover business operations from any type of disruption. Legacy backup approaches won’t address modern workloads – from IaaS and SaaS to containers – and result in an unreliable and slow recovery for the business when it’s needed most. This is what’s focusing the minds of IT leaders as they consider their cyber resiliency plan. They need Modern Data Protection,” commented Allen.

As such, the report indicates that reliability and consistency (protecting IaaS and SaaS alongside data center servers) are the key drivers for improving data protection in 2023. For organizations that are struggling to protect cloud-hosted data with legacy backup solutions, they will likely supplement their data center backup solution with IaaS/PaaS and/or SaaS capabilities.

As ransomware is both the most common and most impactful cause of outages, alongside natural disasters, organizations should implement backup and recovery solutions that support a holistic approach to data protection, that can integrate with other cyber detection and remediation technologies to ensure comprehensive cyber resilience.

Cloud-based services seem nearly inevitable for organizations of all sizes. But similar to how there isn’t just one type of production cloud, there isn’t just one protection cloud scenario. Organizations should consider cloud tiers for retention, Backup as a Service and ultimately, Disaster Recovery as a Service.

The post Modern data backup can help IT leaders keep businesses running appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

Ransomware attacks are a growing threat to businesses and organizations worldwide, especially when it targets critical infrastructure. This concern has raised organizations’ awareness of the importance of integrating a ransomware protection tool to safeguard its business and employees.

According to the FBI’s annual Internet Crime Report, 2021 saw a total of 649 complaints regarding ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure. One such instance was the Colonial Pipeline attack in May 2021. The Colonial Pipeline attack caused significant disruption and resulted in fuel shortages in various regions. The hackers asked for a ransom payment of several million dollars to unlock the encrypted data.

What’s more alarming is that Gartner predicts that by 2025, cyber attacks will have weaponized operational technology environments to successfully harm or kill humans.  This almost became a reality during a ransomware attack on the Florida water system in February 2021. In this attack, the Oldsmar water treatment plant in Florida had its computer systems compromised by ransomware. The attackers tried to raise the amount of sodium hydroxide, or lye, in the water supply, with aim of poisoning the entire water treatment meant for households.

In both attacks, the critical systems were compromised and a lack of a sufficient backup strategy made it harder for them to recover from the ransomware attack. As these examples indicate the harm that ransomware attacks can do, companies must take precautions against such attacks, which is why YTL PowerSeraya Pte Limited, a Singapore utility company and energy producer, has taken the initiative and invested in enhancing in backup and data protection by investing in Veeam.

VEEAM: MODERN DATA PROTECTION KEY TO BUSINESS CONTINUITY

Aaron Raj | 24 February, 2022

YTL PowerSeraya selects Veeam’s ransomware protection

Veeam Software stated that YTL PowerSeraya Pte Limited has switched from its time-consuming tape-based backups to Veeam Availability Suite to protect against a new wave of cyber threats and ransomware attacks.

YTL PowerSeraya relies on a hybrid-cloud platform to deliver online account management services to energy customers and provide essential business processes to the back office. The business decided to switch from time-consuming, tape-based backups to a modern data protection solution in light of the increase of well-funded and well-equipped cyber criminals targeting critical national assets.

According to Fu Xiao Hua, Head of Technology Group at YTL PowerSeraya Pte. Limited, maintaining the efficiency of their power-generating assets around the clock is their top priority.

Fu Xiao Hua, Head of Technology Group at YTL PowerSeraya Pte. Limited

“If our IT systems went offline unexpectedly, we’d feel the impact immediately,” said Fu. “For example, customers would be unable to manage their accounts online, and employees in key functions such as Finance and Human Capital would be unable to carry out their roles. Prolonged downtime could expose the business to significant financial and reputational risks, so we take data protection very seriously.”

YTL PowerSeraya chose Veeam Availability Suite to meet its disaster recovery goals and ensure that its IT systems are operational and always available. With Veeam Backup & Replication, the company is equipped with strong ransomware protection via immutable backups, while Veeam ONE provides comprehensive, intelligent monitoring, reporting, and automation capabilities.

In partnership with Veeam and a Veeam technology partner, the architecture for YTL PowerSeraya’s new data protection solution was created. The new setup goes beyond the 3-2-1-1-0 rule, with three copies of the data at the company’s on-premises data center, one at a backup location, and extra backups to Microsoft Azure.

YTL PowerSeraya has significantly increased its disaster recovery capabilities by switching from tape-based backups to hybrid-cloud data protection from Veeam. The business now performs daily incremental backups, eliminating the possibility of backup jobs extending into production. Additionally, the organization has decreased the recovery time objective (RTO) for a typical 300GB tier-1 server from six hours to two hours – a reduction of 67% that helps lower the risk of prolonged outages for vital internal and customer-facing systems.

YTL PowerSeraya is now looking into new ways to use Veeam to improve its data security strategy. For instance, the company is considering using Veeam Backup for Microsoft Azure to backup virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud and consolidate all IT backup tasks into a single environment.

In conclusion, organizations and people must take precautions to protect themselves from the substantial threat of ransomware attacks. “As a provider of critical national infrastructure for Singapore, it’s vital that we have the tools to fight back against a new generation of cyber threats, including ransomware,” said Fu. “Veeam solutions help us guarantee that key digital services will always be available when our customers need them.”

The post As cyberattacks target critical infrastructures, YTL PowerSeraya enhances ransomware protection with Veeam appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.

The allure of multi-cloud adoption is apparent for corporations looking to embark on their digital transformation journey. This could be driven by motivations spanning from operational flexibility, and cost savings to getting best-of-breed functionality. As 2022 draws to a close, the widespread adoption of the cloud shows no signs of slowing down and will continue to be a key pillar of transformative strategies for forward-thinking organizations. Now, having realized the advantages that the cloud offers, what will be the next steps for organizations ready to make longer-term decisions on their cloud strategy?

In 2023, organizations will be looking for new ways to make their cloud solutions more efficient and cost-effective against the backdrop of a possible recession.

Regaining control of cloud budgets in 2023

According to Veritas research, 94% of organizations globally are overspending on cloud, going over their allocated cloud budgets by an average of 43%. As the amount of data continues to grow year over year, so does the cost of storing it in the cloud, which is becoming harder to justify, though most companies have realized advanced business strategies through cloud adoption. The research also put a spotlight on the misconception around the cloud responsibility model. Nearly all companies assumed the cloud service providers (CSPs) are protecting their data and applications in the cloud, when the latter is only on the line to ensure the resiliency of the cloud.

As a result, it is unsurprising that unforeseen data protection needs were cited as the most common source of unexpected cloud costs. In parallel, businesses are also at risk of facing hefty bills following post-pandemic data storage surge. As businesses grapple with rising inflation, supply chain woes, labor shortages and cyber threats, a sudden step up in cloud storage costs is the last thing they need. To mitigate the cost overruns with organizations planning their cloud budgets without fully understanding what they are ultimately going to need to pay for, CEOs and boards will increasingly demand transparency surrounding the ROI of cloud spend.

Andy Ng, Vice President and Managing Director for Asia South and Pacific Region, Veritas Technologies

With grim reminders of global economic headwinds for next year, we expect scrutiny of IT spending to intensify further in 2023. This will put pressure on IT leaders to justify their cloud budgets while identifying new ways to reduce data volumes. This could lead to more effective data storage and management strategies, such as deduplication techniques to ensure reduced storage consumption.

We also expect more organizations to deploy autonomous cloud-first optimized solutions from a single pane of glass – combining automation, artificial intelligence, and elastic architecture to deliver secure and flexible cloud data protection – while reducing the operational complexity and costs associated with managing multi-cloud environments.

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Cross-cloud data mobility will gain prominence

Across the APAC region, 93% of companies are embracing a multi-cloud strategy. While there are countless benefits to a multi-cloud strategy such as flexibility and agility, interoperability continues to be a challenge for data managers. Not only is it expensive to move data from cloud to cloud, but when clouds are not deployed in a seamless manner, it creates silos within an organization and can introduce potentially major security vulnerabilities.

Over time, these piecemeal cloud data protection solutions add up, creating a continually growing cost and management burden that becomes unsustainable at scale. With hackers growing in sophistication and relentlessly exploiting security loopholes, we have the makings of a perfect storm if security gaps are not addressed in time.

To keep up with the pace of cloud offerings and achieve business-driven cloud goals, businesses will start leveraging AI/ML and autonomous solutions to help mitigate the challenges of siloed workloads to enhance cloud interoperability through data portability. As organizations work to address interoperability challenges and gain more control in the cloud, cross-cloud data mobility will become more mainstream in 2023.

Kubernetes goes mission-critical

According to Veritas research, 86% of businesses around the world are looking to deploy Kubernetes in the next two to three years, and a third already relying on it today. The need to quickly innovate at scale has put pressure on organizations to implement transformational IT strategies in a timely manner. Kubernetes has emerged as a convenient solution, as it is easy for enterprises to deploy, and quickly improves affordability, flexibility, and scalability.

Kubernetes has become mainstream over the last 24 months and organizations have taken the step of moving into serious deployments. Containers are now being adopted in mission-critical environments, meaning that the application environment and the underlying data in these environments now need protection.

Now, ownership of these containers and the protection of them has become more complex, creating silos and confusion over if it’s the backup admin or the DevOps admin that’s responsible. At the same time, organizations are struggling to identify which containers to back up and how to do so, which will likely lead to more investment in training to help close the Kubernetes skills gap. In 2023, IT departments will continue to navigate how to adequately protect and backup their Kubernetes environments.

As we head into 2023, innovation is set to continue at a breakneck pace, with organizations struggling to define best practices in data protection to accommodate the latest cloud architectures and applications. A less complex and more cost-effective solution is often available when DevOps and data protection teams collaborate more closely to extend the corporate data protection platform into these new Kubernetes environments.

The views in this article is that of the author and may not represent the views of Tech Wire Asia. 

The post A Golden Future for Cloud in 2023 appeared first on Tech Wire Asia.