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IT Crystal Ball: How Cloud and Cyber Warfare Will Change

Things This Year

By Chris Ortbals

With the breakneck pace of cyber warfare, it’s difficult to predict what this year holds for
information technology at enterprises – other than, of course, dealing with the tsunami of data
breaches and attempted cyber thefts that are making headlines. Still, it’s becoming clearer that
several major trends are emerging from which CIOs and IT professionals can gain an
advantage.

Among the key prognoses we’re already seeing materialize are these:

1. This year will be the year of cloud recoverability.

2. The application landscape will continue its shift toward being virtualization-ready.

3. Security partnerships will be a necessity, not an option.

4. CIOs must fight for relevance as business unit leads assume more IT buying power.

Let’s take them one by one.

It’s cloud recoverability’s year.

If cloud services are the “new normal for IT,” then data recovery in the cloud is the “new
expectation” – and reality. There will be no let-up in the avalanche of data being stored. Yet
enterprises increasingly desire to recover data more quickly and to have that data always
available.

What good is a backup system if your data can’t be retrieved quickly? Or if it is unusable after
an IT system failure? Backing up data in the cloud doesn’t necessarily mean it’s recoverable, as
you have to go deep into the application layer to recover data and many data backups merely
scratch the surface. That’s why a well thought out disaster recovery plan for the cloud is critical.

Off-site backup and recovery will gain critical importance. Some companies think that because
they move to the cloud, their data automatically becomes highly available. But many times, this
isn’t the case; they’re really highly available in one environment.

This is where virtualization comes in because with it, it’s simpler to shift data to another data
center and quickly bring it back up. More and more, we’re seeing companies have two active
cloud environments running in high availability and in close proximity. But that’s not a true
recovery solution. What if a natural disaster strikes the region? The data should be replicated in
a distant location as a backup.

25 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – March 2015 Edition
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