Monitoring and surveillance has come a long way from the days where everything was recorded onto tapes, and thanks to internet-connected cameras and AI-enabled video analysis, now falls squarely into the purview of IT decision makers.

Whether you’re using it for security or a host of other purposes, there are various questions that ITDMs need to be asking when planning new or expanding existing video surveillance systems. A strong understanding of the uses to which you will put your footage is essential to making the right decisions.

A key consideration is the quality of your footage. Higher image quality and frame rates are of course more useful when it comes to analysing the footage you have captured, showing more details and preventing rapid movements from being lost. However, these factors must be balanced with the increased demands they place on storage, which can, if you aren’t careful, lead to rapidly spiralling costs.

ITDMs will need to strike a balance between not exceeding their budget and capturing footage that is fit for purpose. While it may be tempting to limit the frame rates and image quality of your surveillance system to keep costs down, it’s important to resist going too far and finding that, when you need it, your footage is unusable.

Decision makers will also need to set a retention policy that dictates how long footage needs to be retained before it is erased. In certain regions or industries there are legal requirements for how long surveillance footage must be kept, but even when there are no laws dictating how long your organisation needs to keep this data, a retention policy is essential for the proper management of your surveillance system.

Again, this will be heavily influenced by the purposes to which your surveillance footage is going to be put. If you have long-term requirements of the footage, it’s no good if the footage has been deleted before when you go to access it. But a longer retention period will naturally require more storage.

One approach is to set up a multi-tier retention policy to maximise the availability of your footage without having to repeatedly expand your disk capacity. Easily accessible ‘hot cloud’ storage is ideal for reducing on-prem storage requirements while extending retention policies, by offloading footage to the cloud for archiving after a certain period of time. An ideal cloud storage solution is Wasabi’s hot cloud service, a universal, one-size-fits-all object storage hub that serves as an “active” archive by delivering higher performance than the highest tiers of service from most traditional cloud storage providers, but at cold storage prices.

It’s important when deploying a video surveillance system to calculate your storage requirements. This can be a challenge, but there are various online calculators to assist you. A good rule of thumb is that one camera, recording in 1080p resolution at 30 frames per second, stored at medium quality and running for 24hrs a day, will generate roughly 700GB of data per day. Multiply this by the number of cameras you will be operating and that will give you some indication of your needs.

From here you can adjust footage quality and retention policies to match your storage requirements to your budget, finding a balance to ensure that you have the right surveillance footage available at the right quality, whenever you need it.

Cyber security incidents targeting UK financial services providers increased by 52% in 2021, according to reports filed to the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and analysed by Picus Security.

An FOI filed by the cyber security company found that the majority (65%) of the incidents reported to the FCA were cyber attacks, with one in five involving ransomware and almost a third (31.9%) being classed as data breaches.

Picus Security found March 2021 to be the biggest month for cyber security incidents involving financial services providers, with 21 cyber incident reports filed – more than double the 2021 monthly average and triple the number of incidents reported in March 2020.

According to Picus Labs researchers, the significant spike could have been caused by the Hafnium hacking group, which at the time were found to be exploiting the highly-publicised Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities. The FCA, which regulates the activity of more than 50,000 financial services providers, was not immediately available to comment on the increase in cases.

Suleyman Ozarslan, co-founder of Picus Security and VP of Picus Labs, described the significant increase in cyber incident reports as “a concerning trend” that “should serve as an important reminder to all firms about the need to make ongoing improvements in all areas of security”.

“Financial services firms are amongst the best prepared and most highly capable organisations at detecting and responding to cyber incidents. Yet, despite investing heavily in security and data protection, it’s clear that many continue to experience challenges in these areas,” he said.

The financial sector was one of the many industries which experienced a rapid shift to remote working due to lockdown restrictions, becoming dependent on online communication which has long been a popular target for cyber criminals.

According to Ozarslan, financial services providers “had to contend with being a target of Advanced Persistent Threats and ransomware operators, as well as manage the risks of critical vulnerabilities in widely used systems such as Microsoft Exchange Server”.

“Only by challenging their defensive capabilities on a continuous basis can firms hope to measure their threat readiness more accurately and swiftly close the gaps needed to take their operational resilience to the next level,” he added.

In 2019, the FCA mistakenly published the personal information of approximately 1,600 people who had filed complaints against it, including names and contact details, on its website.

We are living in a digital age of entertainment. Advances in ultra high definition coupled with the boom in streaming and an increased value placed on back catalogues has boosted the media and entertainment industry’s reliance on technological infrastructure to deliver the content and services consumers demand.

The cloud, however, has struggled to keep up with the needs of the industry. The flexibility and ease of access promised by cloud storage seems a natural fit, but the available services and associated fees meant, for a long time, that many entertainment companies were reluctant to risk incurring spiralling costs. Such expenditure, too, can’t necessarily be predicted or allowed for in advance.

This environment, fortunately, is changing. With providers offering single-tier, high-performance storage with predictable pricing, the entertainment industry is finally starting to reap the full benefits of the cloud that were tantalisingly out of reach before.

The changing landscape of cloud

The entertainment world is now digital-first. 4K and 5K resolutions demand much more data. In our global, dispersed business culture, this can mean huge files being transferred all over the world for editing, promotion and eventual release to the public. Many companies have been seeking ways to monetise their archives through on-demand streaming services and other projects, which means their data needs to be easily and reliably accessible.

The cloud would seem the obvious solution to these needs, offering fast scalability and ease of access from any location – as well as reliable backup solutions that are essential for protecting precious archives.

Traditional cloud solutions, however, have often proven to be too expensive. While, theoretically, cloud storage per gigabyte is cheaper than other options like on-premises storage, added costs like egress and API fees as well a bemusing selection of different tiers can make cloud expenditure high and unpredictable. This is especially true if you want to do outrageous things like actually accessing your data.

Cloud providers like Wasabi are now offering simplified and streamlined cloud storage solutions that are finally allowing the cloud to reach its full potential for the media and entertainment industry. Wasabi’s Hot Cloud Storage, for instance, eradicates tiers, envisioning the cloud as a common, reliable utility with a one-size-fits-all solution in which all data is treated equally. This high-quality, low-cost service does away with API and data egress fees and allows for simple, straightforward scalability so organisations can predict their cloud expenses and don’t have to worry about unforeseen costs that can throw budgets into chaos. Entertainment companies can access their stored data as and when they need it.

A Legendary solution

Legendary Entertainment is a leading media company with film, television and digital and comics divisions dedicated to owning, producing and delivering content to a broad audience. Through complete or joint ownership, Legendary commercial entertainment output has realised grosses of more than $17 billion at the global box office.

With media spread over a variety of storage formats and mediums, including on-premises and multiple cloud storage platforms, Legendary found storage becoming a growing financial burden. On top of this, the organisation was increasingly concerned about its ageing hardware.

Collaborating with Wasabi, Legendary was able to offload its expensive on-premises storage to the cloud while still maintaining easy access to its essential files and data. It was also able to reduce cloud storage costs by switching some of its most expensive accounts from other cloud services to Wasabi, cutting down on those egress and API fees and retrieval request charges that had been contributing to its mounting storage budget.

The easy remote access enabled by Wasabi’s solution also allowed editing work to continue remotely during the COVID-19 lockdowns. “Going forward, we see a lot of benefit in enabling employees to work from the comfort of their own home with rapid access to all the work-in-progress and archived assets they need,” said JoAnne Kim, Legendary’s VP of post production technology. “Moving more of our workflow to the cloud will also allow us to hire the best people, no matter where they are.”

Working with Wasabi, Legendary achieved savings by reducing both on-premises and cloud storage costs, and was able to break down a number of storage silos that had been slowing down operations.

“Wasabi has proven to be an easy to use centralised storage environment for a range of studio assets,” said Jason Davison, SVP of information technology at Legendary. “The process of transferring assets to the service is straight forward and all stored content is immediately available so our creative teams can continue to work uninterrupted. With no egress charges, too, we don’t have to worry about how often we access our Wasabi storage or download assets for review and repurposing.”

Read more about Wasabi’s collaboration with Legendary and what it can offer your organisation

Streaming services are brilliant examples of data storage, particularly for those of us that grew up having to record our favourite films onto VHS tapes. In the ‘80s, lots of households had shelf space or even whole cupboards filled with these legacy storage devices. Looking back now, it's amazing to think how much time was spent labelling, organising and simply finding things to watch.

Today we have services like Netflix giving us content at the touch of a button. Its library is also tailored to the end-user, with algorithms based on their preferences offering up suggestions to save time. These are the basic principles currently being applied to video surveillance, where companies like Wasabi use cloud storage and data analytics to give us the whole picture.

When talking about video surveillance it's easy to think of security and crime prevention, but there’s more to it than that. In 2019, the world’s video surveillance systems were generating more than 2,000 petabytes of data every day, according to MarketsandMarkets. Each frame captured can provide unique insights and valuable information. And this data can be collected and analysed with cloud computing services that enable all kinds of functions from facial recognition to traffic monitoring.

What can we do with video surveillance data?

Although CCTV cameras have been around for over 50-years, it’s only recently, with the adoption of cloud computing and IP video (video over internet protocol), that we’ve seen more use cases beyond security. By mixing the technologies together and adding analytical functions to camera software, organisations can find more insights, and ultimately more value, from the footage they capture.

Video analytics is about recognising temporal or spatial events in a video and we can do this with artificial intelligence software that’s been trained to identify and analyse images. Machine learning is used to tag objects, movements, patterns and so on to the point that it can flag changes or moments of interest. For example, traffic cameras have software that can identify road signs and also capture number plates, so if a car breaks the speed limit of the zone, the camera automatically registers the licence plate of the offender.

There are many different use cases for video analytics across a range of industries, such as retail environments, casinos, factories and even whole cities. For example, footfall monitoring systems are used to measure the flow of people to and from specific areas. These systems count people coming and going and also list the times they do with the aim of finding when traffic is at its peak. Similar systems are used by Transport for London to measure things like rush hour travel or if a platform is in danger of becoming overcrowded.

Other forms of spatial imagery include heat mapping, which is a visualisation of data with different colours denoting variations in temperature. There are many versions and use cases for heat maps, but they can also be applied to the monitoring of people. Some retail companies use heat maps to identify which parts of their stores are most popular with customers.

Facial recognition might be the most controversial use case, particularly given its impact on data privacy, but it is only one of a number of purposes to which law enforcement puts video surveillance. Of particular interest is the use of body cameras, which are now worn by most officers. These capture data for cloud-based evidence management systems and, as we’ll see, can lead to mounting costs that turn data storage into a burden for organisations.

The burden of video surveillance data storage

Like those days of recording on VHS tapes, there is only so much on-premises space in which a company can store its video surveillance data. The issue is compounded by the fact camera technology advances more and more each year. High-resolution images mean more data, because the better the camera the more detail it captures, which in turn can be more easily recognised by the software. This constant capture of data presents organisations with a choice: to either blow the budget and pay for more cloud storage or, like VHS tapes, simply delete stored data and record over it with new data.

However, immediate deletion is not always an option. Organisations strive for a particular retention period for surveillance footage – for instance, 30 days before deletion – and may find themselves pinched between these goals and mounting storage costs. In the case of law enforcement agencies, this retention is legally mandated and is likely to far exceed the periods that private companies aim at. Information collected from body cameras and surveillance footage can’t simply be deleted or discarded as it may become important later on, such as for evidence at trial or as an investigation unfolds.

Airport security teams are also burdened with similar guidelines that require video footage for events, such as thefts of passenger fights, to be stored for seven or more years. An incident at an airport can be captured on multiple cameras and played out over a prolonged period, and that is a significant amount of data to hold in an on-prem facility or a costly undertaking if you opt for a third-party cloud provider’s service.

A hybrid cloud environment, which mixes both on-premises and cloud storage, could be the solution. Organisations get more choice for where they keep their data, whether it's needed regularly, or instantly, or if it hasn’t got an immediate use. A good example of flexible cloud storage is Wasabi’s Hot Cloud service which is a universal, one-size-fits-all object storage hub. It takes away tiers and classifications and treats all data the same, allowing it to be readily accessible, whether it's “hot” or not. It costs less than traditional cold storage services – and doesn’t levy egress fees – but it’s also much faster than using frequent-access storage.

Not all data is created equally, according to Wasabi, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be readily available and, more importantly, affordable. When it comes to surveillance, this can make all the difference.

Learn more about how Wasabi can help with your hybrid cloud video surveillance setup

Data is crucial. It’s the fuel that powers today’s transformative business intelligence and analytics applications, and provides the raw material for cutting-edge AI tools. Yet while we think about the data we gather, how we protect it and what we do with it, we don’t always understand the critical importance of how and where it’s stored. The sheer quantities of unstructured data captured by our business applications can create obstacles to using it, while fragmentation is becoming a real issue, as data becomes scattered and siloed across multiple locations, networks and clouds. As data grows, so can storage costs, and so can the challenges of using it effectively.

This is why data architecture matters, and why many organisations are moving on from old file-and-block storage architectures, and towards more efficient object storage. To understand why, we need to take a deeper look at object storage and the key advantages it holds over file and block.

The limits of file-and-block storage

It’s easy to get your head around file storage, because it’s the traditional architecture that most of us still use every day. It’s a hierarchical system based on a metaphor of files and folders, where data is stored in files, named and stored in folders or directories, which may themselves be nested within other folders or directories. By tracing a path through these folders, applications can navigate to the data that they need. To make it easier to find the files through searching, they can also be tagged with metadata, so that you can track them down by the date they were created or modified, their file type, relevant keywords or other useful information.

We still use this storage architecture because it works across many scenarios. It’s fine for collections of small documents. It’s well established, flexible, easy to understand and very efficient when you’re working on a small scale. However, once you start dealing with larger datasets – particularly datasets that are updating in real-time or masses of unstructured data – you hit the limits of file storage fast. The larger and more complex your architecture grows, the harder it is to find a specific file or pull the necessary data from it. What’s more, as your storage structures grow, so does the metadata, meaning files and the data contained within take longer to access and query.

Block storage improves on this by chopping up large chunks of data and storing it within fixed-size blocks or storage volumes, to be accessed through storage protocols by operating systems or applications. It’s normally used in storage area networks or in cloud-based storage environments. Each block has a unique identifier, and the SAN or cloud platform can place each block in the most suitable environment and location, making it easier to optimise block storage for cost or performance. Then, when an application requests data from the storage system, it uses the identifiers to locate the relevant blocks, reassemble them and locate the required data within them.

Block storage still uses metadata, but it’s stored separately from the file itself. What’s more, that metadata is limited to basic file attributes, usually set up when the storage architecture is defined. Like file storage, block storage has its strengths. It’s a fast, effective way to handle vast datasets with low latency, and if you need to change a file you only need to change the block affected by the changes. However, it’s constrained by the limited amounts of metadata, which can slow down search and retrieval operations. What’s more, as the metadata repository grows, it can also grow unwieldy. Most of all, whether it’s stored in a SAN or on cloud-based infrastructure, block storage can become a source of cost creep as the volumes of the data being stored expand.

The object storage difference

Object storage does things differently, bundling file data and metadata together in a single container – the object – with its own unique global identifier. All the objects can be kept in a single, flat warehouse of storage, rather than being held within a nested structure of directories. Each object is self-contained, and the metadata becomes the key to locating and retrieving data. That metadata can be customised for different objects, to cover everything from when the object was created, to its age, to any privacy and security details, any access restrictions and a wide range of other, more specific information. For instance, a video object may include metadata covering which camera and lens was used, the location, any settings used, the people shooting the video, any people in the video and any subjects covered. All this makes it much easier and faster to retrieve the right data on demand, using modern REST APIs.

This flexibility is a key strength of object storage. It scales well, but as datasets grow the metadata doesn’t grow unwieldy. It’s easy to manage, copy and sync data across multiple hardware and cloud-based environments. Object storage is also great for handling large quantities of unstructured data, including image, audio and video data, or data coming in from sensors and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. That makes it ideal for new applications in AI, machine learning or real-time analytics, as well as data backup and archiving solutions.

Of course, object storage has some downsides; you can’t modify an object once created, only recreate it as a new object, and it’s not always as effective at block storage for running more traditional databases.

Object storage and Hot Cloud Storage

Object storage also plays directly into the strengths of cloud-based storage services, including Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. Hot Cloud Storage was designed around high-performance object storage from the ground up, both to optimise how data is stored on Wasabi’s infrastructure, and to optimise how it can be retrieved from large arrays of drives at lightning speed. It’s part of the secret of Wasabi’s unlimited scalability, and its ability to provide high-performance storage without separate hot, cool and cold tiers. The flat, metadata-driven structure means that all stored data can be treated in the same way, no matter which applications or solutions it serves and no matter how it’s classified. It’s also perfect for applications that need to work with high quantities of unstructured data. You can store it where it’s most cost-effective, on the cloud, but without hitting performance or latency barriers that would make AI, ML and analytics applications unworkable.

Using an object storage architecture also helps Wasabi deliver a service without complex price points and SLAs, access constraints or hidden costs. It provides high levels of resilience, as objects can be distributed across multiple storage nodes and rebuilt, if needed, on demand. The flat structure helps combat fragmentation and keeps data accessible and outside of silos. What’s more, it enables data immutability through an Object Lock function, protecting data at the object level so that it can’t be altered or deleted until a set period has expired. That’s ideal for data with compliance requirements, but also any data under threat from ransomware.

Object storage is the ideal storage architecture for next-gen cloud storage services, and Wasabi has the technology to put it to great use.

Learn more about Wasabi Hot Cloud storage

The threat of ransomware has swelled in recent years, with the indiscriminate WannaCry attack five years ago perhaps the first major incident to ring the alarm bells in the eyes of the public after it crippled the NHS. Indeed, while all sectors are vulnerable to ransomware – and can be targeted at any time – the health sector is especially susceptible. Attacks, too, must be headed off with more urgency. This isn’t just because healthcare, like much of the public sector, is lumbered with legacy IT and outdated processes, but the consequences of an attack might be particularly devastating for patients.

Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE), for example, was hit by a ransomware attack last May and was still in the process of recovering as late as September. The NHS, meanwhile, suffered losses of £92 million following the WannaCry attack. Healthcare services across the world have, since 2017, sought to rectify the issues that render them so vulnerable, seeking out systems developed by vendors like Wasabi to patch manifold issues including outdated infrastructure and insufficient backup provision. Despite these efforts, the health sector remains very much at risk.

Cause and effect

While it’s valid to question why healthcare is particularly vulnerable, it’s also worth pondering why ransomware gangs so frequently target institutions like hospitals. “Hackers are in the business of extorting as much money as possible by hitting organisations where they can inflict as much pain as possible,” says VP analyst for security and risk management at Gartner, Katell Thielemann. “When it comes to hospitals, particularly in the middle of a pandemic, they cannot take care of patients without technology, and they have been very responsive to ransomware demands, which just incentivises hackers to strike more.”

Beyond a compulsion to pay, in order to restore services and prevent patient harm, the sector also houses a goldmine of data including personal details and financial information. All these factors, combined with the stresses created by COVID-19, has unsurprisingly led to incidents rising in astonishing fashion.

The sector, too, suffers from a number of unique challenges, many of which centre around the growing volume of data held by healthcare services. “Their architecture is typically very complex,” continues Thielemann, adding that “the operational environment is very fluid with crisis after crisis and people coming and going around the clock”.

Beyond personal patient details, organisations host clinical information such as reports, scans, and genomic data. Much of this is also stored in on-premises infrastructure, as opposed to a streamlined, secure and accessible cloud-based platform.

With digital transformation on the agenda for many sectors, including healthcare, the transition of data from local, on-premises storage to the digital sphere over the last few years has also expanded the attack surface. The use of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in medical contexts, moreover, has inevitably opened more gateways into the sector. As Thielemann puts it: “They are full of all kinds of connected medical equipment that create a cyber-physical continuum of threats.”

The lack of modernised and state-of-the-art backup facilities is yet another thorn in the side of healthcare. Deemed the last line of defence against ransomware, backup systems ensure organisations minimise downtime and recover from attacks as quickly as possible. Multiple backups are preferable, as is ensuring geographical separation between backup copies enabled through cloud storage; in keeping with the ‘3-2-1’ rule.

Getting your backup strategy right, however, demands precision, given that opting for a cloud solution doesn’t eliminate risk in and of itself. These systems may still leave organisations vulnerable through misconfigured buckets, exposed remote desktop services and viruses that can slip into a network and inadvertently get uploaded to the cloud as part of a backup process.

The golden copy

For healthcare organisations seeking to raise their resilience against ransomware attacks in 2022 and beyond, cloud solution providers like Wasabi offer a variety of tools that can bolster defences. Dubbed hot cloud storage with immutability for data protection, Wasabi provides a secure, high-performing, air-gapped and immutable data protection system that’s almost impossible to penetrate.

Consistently and securely backing up applications, configurations and data is the cornerstone of ransomware mitigation, and there’s very little the health sector can do but pay the ransom in the event of an attack without a secure, offsite backup. Immutability, which can be achieved through a Wasabi storage bucket, is essential in ensuring any backup created cannot be tampered with. This means that any data written to the bucket can’t be deleted or manipulated through its storage lifetime. Other benefits include preventing encryption by crypto ransomware, while aiding compliance with a swathe of regulations.

It’s also essential that any ransomware-mitigation solution that healthcare IT deploys is cost-effective, given the need to prioritise expenditure on the front line. The cloud, moreover, is the most feasible in terms of storing data in a secure location off-site. The low cost involved in acquiring Wasabi’s hot cloud storage service, for example, offsets the licensing costs of the backup and recovery tools, reducing the overall cost and improving the expected return on investment dramatically.

Fighting ransomware, particularly for a sector as vulnerable as healthcare, requires engaging in a process of improving and enhancing the technology at your disposal on a continuous basis. It’s also a matter of when, and not if, you’ll suffer a cyber attack. In today’s environment, mitigating ransomware means investing in modern infrastructure and cloud-enabled backup systems that can offer secure and immutable storage. This ensures hospitals can always fall back on a golden copy that’s impossible to tamper with, so there’s no payout to cyber gangs, and patients can continue getting the treatment they need.

Learn more about Wasabi’s hot storage and immutable backups services

The vast majority of UK businesses infected with ransomware ultimately paid the ransom, making it the country most likely to pay cyber criminals in such attacks and twice as likely compared to the global average.

More than three-quarters (78%) of UK businesses were hit with ransomware in 2021, cyber security company Proofpoint said in a report released today, and most of them (82%) paid the hackers to restore access to their data.

The practice of negotiating with cyber criminals is frowned upon by the industry and especially by governments. The FBI reiterated its stance last year after a spate of attacks on US-based companies, such as JBS Foods and Colonial Pipeline, led to ransom payments being made to criminals.

In October, a joint statement from more than 30 countries was released condemning the practice once again. Among the signatories were the US, UK, EU, Germany, France, and Japan.

The latter two were named in Proofpoint's report as the most and least affected countries by ransomware throughout last year respectively. France was the most successfully targeted country with 81% of businesses in its region being infected with ransomware, while Japan was the least affected with just 50% of businesses being infected in 2021.

Ransomware was the third most common result of a successful phishing attack, according to global figures, behind credential compromise in second place and a data breach in first.

A total of 91% of UK businesses faced bulk, indiscriminate phishing attacks last year and more than 20% experienced 50 or more instances of other forms of social engineering-based attacks such as smishing, social media, and vishing attacks - voice-powered phishing methods via phone calls or voice messages.

Bulk phishing attempts on businesses were up across the board with a 12% increase according to 600 businesses surveyed across the UK, Australia, France, Germany Japan, Spain, and the US. Wider social engineering attacks also rose by more than 20%.

"A staggering amount of UK businesses experienced a phishing attack in 2021, and 91% of those attacks were successful,” said Adenike Cosgrove, cybersecurity strategist, international at Proofpoint. "Further, security professionals in the UK are the most likely to face high volumes of non-email-based social engineering attacks.

"This compounds the fact that the UK is facing threats from all angles, however the key to battling these threats starts with employees. All of these attacks require human interaction to be successful, emphasising the need for increased employee security awareness and training. Compared to global counterparts, UK workers had the highest awareness of the term ‘phishing’ which is promising, but at only 62% we still have a way to go to ensure businesses remain secure."

Cyber attacks on corporate networks have increased by 50% in 2021, according to research from Check Point.

Between mid-2020 and throughout 2021, there has been an "upwards trend" of cyber attacks, according to the cyber security firm, reaching an all-time high at the end of the year with a global peak of 925 a week per organisation.

The increase follows Check Point’s previous research back in October 2021 that found a 40% increase in attacks globally, with line in every 61 organisations worldwide impacted by ransomware every week.

"Less than a month after the world witnessed one of the most serious vulnerabilities on the internet, with millions of attacks per hour attempting to exploit the Log4j vulnerability, 2021 has been a record-breaking year in terms of cyber security,” Check Point said.

In 2021, education/research was found to be the sector that experienced the most attacks, clocking an average of 1,605 attacks per organisation every week – a 75% hike from the previous year.

This was followed by the government/military sector’s 1,136 attacks per week (up 47%), and the communications industry which registered 1,079 attacks (up 51%).

In terms of geographical data, Africa experienced the highest volume of attacks in 2021, with an average of 1,582 weekly attacks per organisation - a 13% increase over 2020.

That was followed by APAC with 1,353 (up 25%), while Latin America clocked 1,118 (38%), Europe hit 670 (68%), and North America racked up 503 (61%).

To help prevent these rising attacks, the Check Point advised organisations to maintain up-to-date security patches, segment their networks with strong firewalls and IPS safeguards, raise user awareness in employees, as well as implement appropriate security technologies.

“One of the biggest challenges facing security practitioners is Gen V attacks – the combination of a wide breadth of threats, large scale attacks and a broad attack surface,” the firm said.

“A security architecture that enables and facilitates a unified and cohesive protection infrastructure is going to provide more comprehensive and faster protection than an infrastructure comprised of pieces that don’t work together.”

This year has been eventful to say the least, but green shoots of hope have emerged from the pandemic for businesses across the globe, large and small, public and private.

Many organisations have fully embraced remote and/or hybrid working and have truly adopted cloud and mobile-first thinking to shape their future technology led business decisions. What started out as disruption is fast becoming business as usual, with firms using their particular new normal ways of working as an advantage rather than disadvantage.

"Cloud in all its permutations – hardware/software/services/as a service as well as public/private/hybrid/multi/edge – will play ever greater, and even dominant, roles across the IT industry for the foreseeable future," said Richard L. Villars, group vice president, Worldwide Research at IDC.

"By the end of 2021, based on lessons learned in the pandemic, most enterprises will put a mechanism in place to accelerate their shift to cloud-centric digital infrastructure and application services twice as fast as before the pandemic."

Fellow analyst firm Gartner agrees with IDC’s hypothesis on cloud’s growing popularity, with Brandon Medford, its senior principal analyst saying: “Organisations are advancing their timelines on digital business initiatives and moving rapidly to the cloud in an effort to modernise environments, improve system reliability, support hybrid work models and address other new realities compelled by the pandemic.”

Multiple changes, multiple benefits

Other, wider, changes are starting to occur, too, with businesses gaining a better understanding that cloud potentially offers them more control and security rather than less - a real, but unfounded, concern in years gone by.

One of those key changes is the recognition of and move towards a multi-cloud operating environment where firms can enjoy the best of all worlds and do what works best for their specific business on a use case-by-case basis with maximum agility and minimal complexity.

Experts concur that multi-cloud will be a popular choice this year and beyond, with IDC dubbing 2021 as “The year of multi-cloud as the global COVID-19 pandemic reaffirms critical need for business agility.”

It predicts that the majority (90%) of enterprises around the world will be making use of a mixture of on-premises, dedicated cloud and off-premises, public and private clouds by default come 2022.

"The widespread disruption caused by the global COVID-19 outbreak has reinforced the critical importance of businesses being agile enough to scale up or down with fluctuations in demand," says IDC's Jyoti Lalchandani, group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Turkey, and Africa (META).

"A public cloud platform provides enterprises with an agile, scalable, and cost-effective IT infrastructure that supports their business processes. However, public cloud is not necessarily an appropriate option for all types of workloads. As such, some enterprises are choosing to keep certain workloads on-premises – using an in-house datacenter – or on private clouds. This approach helps them achieve better performance, 24/7 availability, enhanced security, and greater compliance with regulations."

What next?

Once a business has decided multi-cloud is the best way forward, what are the next steps and key considerations? Avoiding vendor lock-in will, obviously, be high on the agenda (see our feature on how to avoid cloud vendor lock-in for more information) and companies will also want to ensure any future partners have their best interests in mind, rather than feeling like just another number on a spreadsheet.

While it may seem convenient to start by looking at the big hyperscalers, it might actually make more sense to cast your business gaze elsewhere. That’s very much the spirit of the multi-cloud world where loyalty can become a penalty rather than a benefit.

Jeff Flowers, CTO and co-founder of hot cloud storage provider Wasabi, is a big fan of a multi-cloud approach, citing the immediate benefits of storing data in two places meaning data is always most available and most reliable.

“With multi-cloud solutions you also get some leverage against your vendors… If you wind up using a single cloud and you don’t like it and you have petabytes there it could be months before you’re out of that cloud,” he stresses.

“At Wasabi, we’re so low cost it makes it a no-brainer to have multi-cloud and keep a copy with us and copy with Amazon, Azure, whoever. “

David Friend, co-founder and CEO at Wasabi, agrees that it makes sense to use different cloud providers for, say, your compute, storage, content delivery and so on. What’s more, he talks up the benefits of your vendors choosing the right partners themselves.

“This is the way the computing industry has always gone. We’ve always started with monoliths like IBM, that sold you printers and disk drives, CPUs, and memory cards and everything else and now that’s fractured. You go into a typical data centre today and you’ll see dozens of different vendors’ equipment all mixed and matched,” Friend said during a Facebook live session.

“I think that’s the way the cloud will go. I don’t think customers will put up with the idea that you get everything from one vendor, because no matter how big you are, you can’t be the best at everything.”

As of January 2021, Wasabi had more than 21,000 customers and had forged solid relationships with in excess of 350 technology partners. That’s in addition to expanding its available storage by 150%.

Partnering with good partners for customer success

Building on the importance of good partnerships, the channel also plays a key role in Wasabi’s go-to-market strategy.

Marty Falaro, Wasabi’s executive vice president and COO, referenced its growing channel partner network in a blog post towards the end of 2020, stating that the firm had almost tripled its partner base in the space of a year. He also said around 200 new partners were pledging their allegiance to the firm each and every month, on average.

“Wasabi is committed to delivering low cost, fast, secure cloud storage to customers worldwide. Wasabi is also committed to building a profitable channel program to attract thousands of partners interested in helping us deliver this disruptive cloud storage service to the world,” he wrote.

“Part of the disruptive nature of Wasabi is the simplicity of what we are doing. Our pricing is simple with no hidden or variable fees like all of the hyperscalers have. Wasabi only charges you for the cloud storage you use and nothing else. No egress fees or API request fees which are intended to lock you into these hyperscalers.”

In a Forbes op-ed in early 2021, Falaro also talked about how the channel is key to offering a better deal than the cloud competition, AKA Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

“We decided to take a different approach. Instead of just making our storage available to the channel, we made it a priority to build relationships with our ecosystem and identify ways to be more attractive than our competitors,” he wrote.

“One of the best ways to be more attractive is just by being easier to work with. In our case, Wasabi’s flat pricing model makes our storage easy to understand and to budget for. This makes our partners’ customers happy and, thus, makes our partners happy too.”

But don’t just take Wasabi’s word for it. Others have commented - positively so - on the impact the market entrant has made since its arrival on the scene back in 2017.

Indeed, IDC heralded Wasabi as a vendor that had been instrumental in shaping things in its 2020 Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Market Shares report.

“As enterprises continue to expand their reliance on stored data and cloud services, Wasabi will remain well positioned for growth, striking a unique balance between high-performance and low-cost object storage which appeals to a wide range of enterprises, partners and use cases,” said Andrew Smith, research manager, Cloud infrastructure Services at IDC.

“Wasabi was founded to take the complexity out of cloud storage performance and pricing and to make it more reliable and transparent. As 2020 forced us all to reimagine how we work and conduct business, low-cost, reliable and scalable cloud storage is more important than ever,” Wasabi’s Friend added.

“This recognition from IDC alongside some of the world’s most well-known technology companies validates our more simplified and predictable approach to cloud storage. With our recent funding, revenues tripling each of the last three years, and exponential partner and customer growth, we’re well-positioned to grow our leadership in the IaaS market.”

Disaster recovery (DR) is the business equivalent of wearing seatbelts in a car. You don’t want to be involved in a crash, but at least if you are, you have some level of protection to get back to normal. It’s something nobody wants to think about, but it’s better to be prepared should disaster strike…

But it can be hard to rationalise the costs and resources involved in focusing on something that is statistically still unlikely to happen, all things considered.

Against the backdrop of the pandemic, with the wholesale shift - seemingly overnight - to remote working en masse, it would be fairly safe to assume that organisations would realise that backup and disaster recovery was an even more important consideration in the new world versus the old.

However, the theory is not always borne out in reality. Indeed, some firms feel immune to the ill-effects of an increasingly volatile threat landscape and that it’s a case of if rather than when with regards to them being on the wrong side of such a situation.

The cost of not...

But they still need to tread cautiously…

Almost one-third of individuals never back up their data and one in ten computers are infected with viruses each and every month, according to the World Backup Day website. What’s more, it suggests some 29% of disasters are caused by accident and that more than 100 phones are lost or stolen every minute. It all adds up, for sure.

The Ponemon Institute’s 2021 Cost of a Data Breach study, carried out in association with IBM, found that incidents now cost organisations $4.24 million on average. It is believed this represents a 17-year high and is a 10% increase on pre-pandemic costs associated with breach-related back-up requirements.

"Higher data breach costs are yet another added expense for businesses in the wake of rapid technology shifts during the pandemic," said Chris McCurdy, vice president and general manager, IBM Security.

"While data breach costs reached a record high over the past year, the report also showed positive signs about the impact of modern security tactics, such as AI, automation and the adoption of a zero trust approach – which may pay off in reducing the cost of these incidents further down the line."

In the old world of on-premises and traditional technological mixes, DR was never necessarily easy, but it was also a fairly simplistic affair - you knew what you had and where it was stored so the comeback was a linear affair.

But that doesn’t mean it was an easy endeavour. In fact, the opposite was largely true, particularly if you had all your eggs in one basket and were, therefore, reliant on one vendor to get you back up and running.

In the cloud world, especially with multi-cloud, things can seem more complicated from a backup and DR perspective. But is what we perceive on the face of it ingrained in reality or just a throwback to what we think is true rather than what is true?

Many firms actually cite DR as a reason to adopt a multi-cloud strategy rather than avoid it, according to analyst firm Gartner. The benefits aren’t just limited to concerns over backup and DR, it would seem.

“Most organisations adopt a multi-cloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions,” according to Michael Warrilow, VP analyst at Gartner. “We expect that most large organisations will continue to willfully pursue this approach.”

Cloud-first DR

Ransomware is also a growing threat for organisations around the world. And, while protection can be enhanced through cloud and mobile first technologies, the same advancements are lowering the threat barriers for those with malintent.

“The negative impact of evolving ransomware attacks is seen as so severe by executives that it tops a notable list of risks related to an ongoing pandemic and the disruption of the global supply chain,” said Matt Shinkman, vice president with the Gartner Risk and Audit practice.

“While new models of ransomware attacks are frightening in their own right, the consequences for organisations are even worse. Prolonged operational delays, data loss and exposure, as well as the reputational damage that follows, present potential existential risks to an organisation that executives are all too well aware of, especially if the attacks occur as a result of inadequate cybersecurity controls,” Shinkman added.

But it’s not just about the vendors you choose as a business, it’s also about their wider partner ecosystem and how that can benefit you in a variety of ways - whether DR-driven or business-as-usual.

As an example, in March 2021, hot cloud storage provider Wasabi, partnered with Kaseya company Unitrends in a bid to enable enterprises to free up primary storage capacity and garner added value across their business operations.

This, in essence, further demonstrates the value of working with multiple providers. In this instance, Unitrends is the expert in automated, resilient data protection delivered through a mix of appliance and cloud-based activity, while Wasabi offers low cost, but high-performance, cloud-based storage with no egress fees and no fear of vendor lock-in.

“Organisations both small and large are facing a unique challenge as a result of ballooning data volumes being produced during the pandemic. They are looking for more flexible options to help manage their evolving data landscape while ensuring they remain in compliance with long-term retention requirements,” said Joe Noonan, general manager at Unitrends.

“Our partnership with Wasabi allows organisations to regain control of this data in a cost-effective and sustainable way.”

David Boland, senior director of product marketing at Wasabi, has previously written about the benefits of a cloud-first DR approach.

In short, he cites seven key benefits:

• Enables the focus to remain on value-added corporate back up activities
• You only pay for what you use with Anything-as-a-Service
• The shift from CapEx to OpEx
• You benefit from continuous upgrades in storage technology
• Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) takes care of manual tasks automatically, resulting in reduced costs
• Following the 3-2-1 rule (Retaining three copies of data on two different storage types with one, additional copy located off-site)
• Back up AND recovery in seconds through the cloud versus a great deal of coordination and manual intervention previously

“Managing what I call cold data - the infrequently-used information that is still potentially important - is incredibly burdensome for companies. It takes up valuable storage capacity and can pose security risks since it is given less attention than hot data that is being used day-in and day-out,” said Wasabi CEO and co-founder, David Friend.

“Migrating this data to the cloud is a sensible option for any organisation as it frees up capacity, reduces latency issues and provides a secure home for this valuable information. Unitrends’ commitment to providing easy-to-use and secure backup makes them an ideal partner for Wasabi as we work together to enable a new approach to long-lasting and cost-effective cloud storage.”

The promise of cloud computing is the ability to transform and revolutionise – opening up new ways of thinking and doing things. In essence, it offers businesses, regardless of where they’re based or what industry they’re operating in, a sense of freedom – freedom to think and behave differently and freedom from traditional constraints linked to cost, scale, security and so on.

But freedom is also about the ability to choose which cloud product and services you want to consume, when, and how. So the idea of being locked into what can feel like infinity with just one cloud vendor seems unthinkable, right?

Unfortunately, while it’s unthinkable and unrealistic for many, it’s normality for others, with some cloud providers essentially promising the world, but only willing to deliver the goods if customers are willing to sign-up to fixed terms of service, complex small print and large financial penalties if they want to leave earlier than planned.

More or less?

Research by Bain & Company, published in September 2020, found that the majority (65%) of CIOs plan to use multiple cloud vendors. The reasoning is varied, with some citing price and others citing variety, but the worry about lock-in is a clear driver for many, according to the study.

The uneasiness surrounding potential lock-in can have adverse knock-on effects and result in companies working with more cloud providers than they might otherwise need to in order to avoid putting all their cloud eggs in the same basket. This, best case scenario, could result in spending far more time, effort and budget than would otherwise be needed. Worst case, multiple lock-ins. Either way, trying to forge more partnerships because you’re worried having just one will be dangerous isn’t a solid strategy.

That’s where specialist cloud firms and a multi-cloud approach arrive on the scene. Having the right mix of providers working together to deliver on your business needs, you can actually simplify rather than complicate things.

Analyst firm IDC has dubbed 2021 as the year of multi-cloud and it’s easy to see why, based on the evidence presented against vendor lock-in itself and knee-jerk reactions by organisations to try and avoid falling foul of being locked in.

"The widespread disruption caused by the global COVID-19 outbreak has reinforced the critical importance of businesses being agile enough to scale up or down with fluctuations in demand," said IDC's Jyoti Lalchandani, group vice president and regional managing director for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa (META).

"A public cloud platform provides enterprises with an agile, scalable, and cost-effective IT infrastructure that supports their business processes. However, public cloud is not necessarily an appropriate option for all types of workloads. As such, some enterprises are choosing to keep certain workloads on-premises – using an in-house data centre – or on private clouds. This approach helps them achieve better performance, 24/7 availability, enhanced security, and greater compliance with regulations."

As a result, IDC has predicted that the majority (more than 90%) or companies will follow a multi-cloud path come 2022, seeking out fit-for-purpose specialists rather than generalists where and when it makes the most sense.

Fellow experts agreed with Michael Warrilow, VP analyst at Gartner, who said: “Most organisations adopt a multi-cloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions. We expect that most large organisations will continue to willfully pursue this approach.”

The need for speed?

But Warrilow does urge caution before going all-in on multi-cloud and advises against moving from A to B too quickly.

“There are many nuances between platforms, and trying to build services in more than one simultaneously is challenging. Starting slowly also allows time for in-house staff to develop their skills and learn how to manage the cloud.”

“Should you really embrace the entire stack from a single vendor just to take advantage of their speciality services?” Wasabi CEO and co-founder David Friend wrote in a blog post. “While it’s convenient, what are the risks? It’s not as though the cloud has eliminated all technology risks. So what risks remain, and how are you going to address them?

“Whether you’re worried about it or not, if you go with a single cloud provider you are in fact tying yourself to that vendor, with all that entails. From the transfer fees to get your data back out (for any reason, including no longer being a customer of the vendor, extended downtime of the provider, etc.), to the closed APIs that your solution is built on that would require varying levels of refactoring (at the least), to blowing it up and trying again in order to deploy on another cloud.”

He continued: “Moving to the cloud? Don’t repeat past mistakes. Avoid vendor lock-in and build it your way with a best-of-breed, multi-cloud strategy.”

As companies realise what will work best for them when it comes to cloud, spending in this area will increase. Indeed. Gartner predicts that public cloud spend will top $396 billion this year and grow by 21.7% to reach $482 billion next year. More specifically, the analyst firm believes spend on public cloud will surpass 45% of all enterprise IT spend by 2026 – a figure that’s up from 17% this year.

“The economic, organisational and societal impact of the pandemic will continue to serve as a catalyst for digital innovation and adoption of cloud services,” said Henrique Cecci, senior research director at Gartner. “This is especially true for use cases such as collaboration, remote work and new digital services to support a hybrid workforce.”

When/where/why?

Another Gartner research piece suggested that the pandemic had served as a catalyst for re-defining whether mission-critical workloads needed to be on-premise or in the cloud.

“The events of last year allowed CIOs to overcome any reluctance of moving mission critical workloads from on-premises to the cloud. Even absent the pandemic there would still be a loss of appetite for data centres,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner.

Nag added: “Emerging technologies such as containerization, virtualisation and edge computing are becoming more mainstream and driving additional cloud spending. Simply put, the pandemic served as a multiplier for CIOs’ interest in the cloud.

“...Cloud will serve as the glue between many other technologies that CIOs want to use more of, allowing them to leapfrog into the next century as they address more complex and emerging use cases. It will be a disruptive market, to say the least.”

The cloud will also play a key role in strengthening your security posture, which makes flexibility and the avoidance of lock-in even more important. The need to plan and tread carefully in this area will only grow as the threat landscape intensifies.

Ransomware was called out as the main threat facing organisations as we move further into the final calendar quarter of 2021, according to Gartner. Other key concerns related to a growing skills gap and how to best support new ways of working and hybrid collaboration, but the possibility of new and emerging ransomware threat remains the biggest headache.

“The negative impact of evolving ransomware attacks is seen as so severe by executives that it tops a notable list of risks related to an ongoing pandemic and the disruption of the global supply chain,” said Matt Shinkman, vice president with the Gartner Risk and Audit practice.

“While new models of ransomware attacks are frightening in their own right, the consequences for organisations are even worse. Prolonged operational delays, data loss and exposure, as well as the reputational damage that follows, present potential existential risks to an organisation that executives are all too well aware of, especially if the attacks occur as a result of inadequate cyber security controls.”

Money talks

In April this year, BAE Systems suggested that the majority (74%) of banks and insurers had experienced an increased exposure to cyber crime since the pandemic began. Despite the growing risk curve, just over a quarter (26%) of firms said the budget they had to dedicate to fighting such battles had decreased in the past 12 months.

“We’re noticing a clear collaboration emerging between different groups of criminals across the wider landscape of serious and organised crime,” said Adrian Nish, Head of Cyber at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence. “Fraudsters and cyber criminals seek to exploit fear, uncertainty and change, and the pandemic has offered them new opportunities to probe for weaknesses they can monetise and new ways to disguise their activity.

“Attackers are building increasingly advanced capabilities to target core banking systems and becoming more aggressive, harming victims’ ability to respond to attacks. Online criminals have reacted fast, adapting their approach to hunt out remote working security gaps and prey on the vulnerable.”

Even without the worry of vendor lock-in, security remains a boardroom concern, but add the idea of inflexibility when you need it most and you could be opening up a threat-based can of worms.

Wasabi’s Friend wrote about such concerns in a recent Fintech Herald article, highlighting that even the Bank of England was concerned about the impact on certain cloud providers and services when it came to financial security.

“Where cyberthreats are concerned, ransomware is one of the highest priority threats to banks, and cloud vendor lock-in can exacerbate the threat ransomware poses,” Friend wrote.

“By pitching themselves as a ‘one stop shop’ for data storage and management, bigger providers encourage developers to build their entire technology infrastructure on their platforms, while making it hard to move business to other cloud providers. Such a concentration of power lends itself to the risks identified in the Bank of England report, as it can give rise to opaque business practices whereby security information and how to monitor risks isn’t transparent.”

He added: “Diversifying your cloud providers is important to mitigate against the security risks of vendor lock-in. It will minimise the risks of data loss and downtime while also enabling cost savings in the long-term by avoiding getting locked into long term contracts with a single vendor.”

It’s clear, then, that lock-in can actually exacerbate existing issues and create new ones, especially when it comes to cost, complexity and security. That’s why there should never be a one-size-fits-all approach to the cloud. Businesses should be afforded the opportunity to consider – and work with a trusted partner to validate – what matters to them and proceed, albeit with caution, from thereon in.

“Many customers are beginning to feel locked into services with AWS and Azure and are looking towards alternatives to support their cloud storage needs,” according to Nucleus Research.

“In 2021, companies like Wasabi will show enterprises that there are cost-effective alternatives to the larger cloud service providers, and these solutions can be implemented without compromising performance or overall capabilities.”

Learn more about Wasabi’s services

The value that cloud computing can – and does – deliver to businesses of all sizes and sectors is now widely understood. But, historically, such credit was not always easily given. In fact, there were times when people even struggled to understand what the cloud was, let alone how it could add value to them as individuals, their departments and the wider business.

Analyst firm Gartner had previously predicted that a corporate “no cloud” policy would be as prevalent as a “no internet” policy in the majority of companies come 2020. And, as we hurtle at speed through 2021 and into the future, it’s very hard to imagine any company that doesn’t have at least some element of cloud in its IT mix.

There are many reasons behind this shift from “What is cloud?” to “How can I take advantage of the cloud?” with some of it being attributed to the natural, evolutionary pattern of business technology – that is, cloud understanding and adoption would have accelerated organically anyway.

Insatiable hunger for the cloud

Other “surprise” elements have also played a role, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. It forced businesses to think on their feet and change without notice almost overnight as remote working became the only way to keep the wheels of business turning for many.

This increased appetite for cloud will see spending balloon, according to Gartner, which predicts that cloud will account for 14.2% of overall IT purchasing by 2024 – up from 9.1% last year.

“The pandemic validated cloud’s value proposition,” said Sid Nag, research vice president at Gartner. “The ability to use on-demand, scalable cloud models to achieve cost efficiency and business continuity is providing the impetus for organisations to rapidly accelerate their digital business transformation plans. The increased use of public cloud services has reinforced cloud adoption to be the ‘new normal,’ now more than ever.”

“The COVID-19 pandemic forced organisations to quickly focus on three priorities: preserve cash and optimise IT costs, support and secure a remote workforce, and ensure resiliency. Investing in cloud became a convenient means to address all three of these needs.”

With many employees no longer tied to a physical office, there is greater emphasis on facilitating hybrid collaboration and productivity through cloud and associated technologies. While data has always been the lifeblood of business, the need to ensure slick information flow and gain data-driven insight is on the rise as organisations try and find a path to sustained success in the new normal.

Accessibility and agility will become key watchwords in firms’ playbooks and multi-cloud will become part of their operating toolbox to move benefits from theoretical to reality.

The cloud and your security posture

Security concerns have also intensified as a result of the shift to mobile and hybrid working and the cloud can also play a key role in resilience and proactive protection.

Ransomware – and, in particular, the emergence of new, unknown types – has been cited as the top threat keeping IT and business executives awake at night in the final quarter of 2021, according to Gartner.

The other concerns that make up the top five list include being able to source the right talent, COVID-19 being endemic, supply chain disruption and problems relating to the smooth running of a hybrid workforce.

“While new models of ransomware attacks are frightening in their own right, the consequences for organisations are even worse,” said Matt Shinkman, vice president with the Gartner Risk and Audit practice.

“Prolonged operational delays, data loss and exposure, as well as the reputational damage that follows, present potential existential risks to an organisation that executives are all too well aware of, especially if the attacks occur as a result of inadequate cybersecurity controls.”

The City of Beaumont in California, which boasts a population of more than 50,000 people, stores the City Hall and Police data. Historically it used off-site storage at two separate sites with no replication or additional storage.

It turned to the cloud to help reduce reliance on legacy storage hardware and mitigate ransomware threats, working with hot cloud storage firm Wasabi and cloud data management specialist Rubrik to help do just that.

“The Wasabi-Rubrik solution fulfilled all the checkboxes when it came down to CJIS compliance and restore time. We couldn’t have chosen a better service for our city,” said Edgar Trenado, information technology manager at the City of Beaumont.

Forming the right alliances for today and tomorrow

Given the increasingly important role the cloud does and will play in modern business life, it’s key for firms to ensure they’re forming the right connections across the board. And that means selecting the right partner who can serve as a trusted advisor on key matters as well as playing the role of traditional cloud supplier.

That said, there is nothing traditional about the way in which Wasabi operates. Since it’s arrival back in 2017, the firm has really shaken up the market and given businesses much more freedom and choice.

This is evidenced by the firm’s mission statement, which says: “Wasabi is on a mission to store all the world’s data by making data storage simple, affordable, fast and secure. If you have data to store, whether it’s backups, x-rays, surveillance videos, financial data, media and entertainment or scientific data, Wasabi’s pledge is to always be the cheapest, fastest, most secure and reliable cloud storage in the world. It’s all we do, and we do it better than anyone.”

When it comes to cost efficiency, Wasabi says prices are 80% lower than AWS S3, with no egress or API charges. Performance is also greatly accelerated with private network options and speedy uploads and downloads. And, when it comes to protection and security, Wasabi delivers data centre redundancy, 11x9s data durability and immutable storage.

But it’s not just a case of Wasabi singing its own praises. Industry experts and customers also see the firm as somewhat of a breath of fresh air to the cloud industry.

Indeed, IDC recognised Wasabi as a firm that had helped shape the year in its Worldwide Public Cloud Infrastructure as a Service Market Shares report in 2020.

“The public cloud IaaS market is a massive, high-growth IT infrastructure segment – topping $65.5 billion in 2020. However, it is an extremely difficult market for new entrants to establish themselves – especially pureplay providers,” commented Andrew Smith, research manager, Cloud infrastructure Services at IDC.

He continued: “Wasabi is one of few vendors that has successfully broken into the IaaS market, establishing a significant customer and partner base in public cloud storage. As enterprises continue to expand their reliance on stored data and cloud services, Wasabi will remain well positioned for growth, striking a unique balance between high-performance and low-cost object storage which appeals to a wide range of enterprises, partners and use cases.”

Cloud in and of itself gave businesses a little breathing space to at least think about how to do things differently. And, while the pandemic was somewhat of a shock, most businesses have used the opportunity to combine the two and reimagine how technology can support business needs in new and evolving ways.

“Wasabi was founded to take the complexity out of cloud storage performance and pricing and to make it more reliable and transparent. As 2020 forced us all to reimagine how we work and conduct business, low-cost, reliable and scalable cloud storage is more important than ever,” said David Friend, CEO and co-founder of Wasabi.

“This recognition from IDC alongside some of the world’s most well-known technology companies validates our more simplified and predictable approach to cloud storage. With our recent funding, revenues tripling each of the last three years, and exponential partner and customer growth, we’re well-positioned to grow our leadership in the IaaS market.”

Learn more about Wasabi’s services

Ransomware is a threat that has been with us for a long time, and thanks to some recent, high-profile cases – coupled with our increasingly dispersed, and therefore increasingly vulnerable, networks – the spotlight has swung back around to this key area in IT security.

In this report, brought to you in association with Wasabi, we will explore how these threats are evolving – and the new solutions that are emerging to keep our critical systems safe.

Download it now to find out what makes a company vulnerable, how to build a backup strategy, and more.

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Cloud computing customers are hemorrhaging unnecessary budget, according to UK and US-focused research released this week.

The survey of 350 cloud decision makers by Arlington Research on behalf of cloud optimization firm Virtana found that the majority (82%) of comoanies using cloud are spending far more than they need to.

One of the factors limiting cost efficiency in the cloud is a lack of visibility across multiple cloud workloads, with 86% of respondents suggesting that they cannot get a global view of cloud costs in minutes and 70% of companies said that limited visibility wastes time and creates cost inefficiencies. This is a particular problem for the 84% of respondents with workloads deployed across multiple public cloud infrastructures.

"The pandemic has accelerated organizations' journey to the cloud," said Archana Vankatarman, Associate Research Director, Cloud Data Management, IDC Europe. "In fact, a 'more aggressive move to the cloud' was cited as the top item on the list of planned changes to the IT strategy as a result of the 2020 crisis, according to IDC's COVID-19 Impact Survey in 2020."

Virtana noticed a disconnect between perception and performance. While real-world cloud financials were dire, respondents rated their own ability to handle costs highly. More than three-quarters of respondents said they were adept at identifying unused resources, configuring real-time cost alerts, and understanding cost allocations. Over four in five rated themselves highly at forecasting usage patterns and predicting long-term spending. These are crucial skills in cloud cost management, because they enable better long-term savings through mechanisms like instance reservations.

In spite of this confidence, many companies didn't have the necessary tools to handle costs. Fewer than half of them had billing visibility tools and usage dashboards. Only 53% of respondents had capacity and usage planning tools in-house.

Organizational structures might be exacerbating these problems. More than two-thirds of all companies felt that their teams worked in silos, with even more complaining that limited collaboration hindered their ability to adapt. Companies used fragmented sets of tools and techniques to manage their cloud infrastructures, the survey found.

The problem is escalating as companies shift more workloads to the cloud. Almost nine in ten respondents now have more than a quarter of their workloads in the cloud, while 44% are running more than half there.

Archana added: "Public cloud platforms provide enterprises with agile, on-demand, flexible access to resources to align with a digital business's dynamic needs. But inefficient cloud operations are emerging as a top barrier. The duct-taped point tools and silos can make cloud cost management complex. The belief that they are wasting at least 15% of their public cloud spending will drive enterprises to actively invest in cloud cost management to halve cloud waste."

Optimizing cloud economics - a process known as FinOps - is a growing discipline for companies disillusioned with the amount that they're spending in the cloud. Earlier this year, a survey by the Linux Foundation found costs spiralling for users of the Kubernetes container orchestration system, who were failing to track their expenditure.

"The survey shows that one of the biggest challenges is how to manage workloads operating in the cloud to avoid unexpected costs," said Christina Richards, Virtana's CMO.

"While it's clear that experience makes a difference, so does having a single modular platform for de-risking cloud migrations, having deep precision observability into workloads before, during, and after the move, and optimizing and managing efficiently once workloads are in the cloud."

Cloud adoption has now reached the point where it’s not just part of the IT operations mainstream, but the most obvious, cost-effective solution to many core IT needs. Last year IDC reported that spending on public cloud IT infrastructure had exceeded spending on non-cloud IT infrastructure for the first time. Within this report, it was noted that cloud storage is one of the fastest growing segments in the field – IDC saw spending increase by 21.2% between 2019 and 2020 – and it’s not hard to understand why. Enterprises see moving some or all of their data storage to the cloud as a means of reducing their management overheads. They understand why cloud storage gives them the flexibility and scalability they need to thrive in uncertain times.

Migrating data to the cloud isn’t as simple as pointing at the biggest, loudest provider and moving all your data to their cloud. Instead, you need a clear migration strategy, built on well-defined processes and an understanding of your data with respect to your long-term business requirements. This will help you to identify the provider that best suits your needs, whether that’s one of the familiar, long-established names or a newer specialist like Wasabi. With options available to select a best of breed solution without vendor lock in, organisations are primed to make the most of cloud’s efficiencies. Without, they tend to overspend or fail to meet their cloud objectives. Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud report found that businesses were overspending on their public cloud budgets by an average 24%.

Get to know your data

The process starts with an inventory and evaluation of all the data in your business, identifying and prioritising those data resources which will be easiest and most beneficial to migrate. This involves focusing in on their performance and security requirements and how they interoperate with on-premise systems or existing cloud-based applications.

Here it’s crucial that technical requirements are tied to business needs, so that when you list and evaluate resources for migration, you’re looking at the costs of maintaining them on-premises, the life-expectancy of the data, how often it needs to be accessed or modified and how fast that access needs to be. But you also need to think about your long-term business goals, including how the data could potentially be used in the future. Moving resources to the cloud can be a cost-saving measure and a chance to delete stale data or unnecessary duplicates from expensive on-prem systems, but it can also be a false economy if decisions negatively impact performance or constrain you later on when you need to bring the data back.

Depending on where and how the data is stored, you may also need to think about more specific issues. For example, with some old tape-based archival systems, you may need to work around complex file-management middleware or proprietary metadata systems, which may require a specific set of tools. It’s also useful to consider security requirements and who needs access at this point. Too many businesses make too many resources and too much data available to a wider group of workers than may be necessary. Migration can be an opportunity to tighten up data access controls.

Pick your architecture and provider

With an inventory of your data in hand, you can focus on the resources you plan to migrate first. It’s at this point that you need to think about cloud storage architectures, platforms and providers. With many cloud storage providers, this is where you would normally start thinking about tiering – selecting the most appropriate service or service tier for each resource depending on your performance, accessibility and security requirements. This is where bad decisions you make early could have consequences later on.

However, with the newer, second-generation cloud storage providers, such as Wasabi, this isn’t such an issue. They deliver cloud storage as a fast, economical utility without any slower or faster tiers. Instead, the service simply delivers the level of performance required to meet the widest range of use cases and applications.

You don’t have to put all your storage eggs in one cloud basket. In some cases, there will be technical reasons to use a specific provider for a certain data resource, but migrate the majority to one where costs are lower, and where you’ll have more visibility and control. Many businesses will also be looking at a hybrid cloud strategy, combining new or existing on-premises infrastructure with compute or storage services in the cloud. This enables them to use on-premises hardware where there are compelling performance, security or compliance reasons to do so, but gain all the advantages of cloud elsewhere.

Of course, making cloud work from a cost perspective isn’t a given. Some hyperscale public cloud providers are well known for hidden costs, including fees for data egress or API requests that scale up in parallel with your usage. With Wasabi, it’s simple and predictable so there are no surprises in the pricing structure, making it easier to predict your expenses and stay within your budget. Wasabi offers one tier of affordable, high performance storage with no fees for egress or API requests.

This plays brilliantly into a hybrid or multi-cloud approach where businesses are moving workloads as well as data to the cloud. Bit-level compatibility and direct high-speed connectivity means you can use Wasabi for data storage while running applications on another platform, whether on-premises or in a private or public cloud. For instance, Wasabi supports hundreds of Amazon S3-compliant file management applications and data migration tools and can work seamlessly with applications running on the corporate network, or on Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure or Google Compute Engine virtual machines.

Of course, selecting the right architecture and provider isn’t just about price and performance, but also about security and compliance requirements. Firms need to feel sure that their provider offers levels of security appropriate to the type and sensitivity of any data being stored, and that the service has the tools and capabilities to meet any national or industry regulations and support compliance. Here, providers like Wasabi support a wide range of tools and comply with even the most common security and privacy regulations, like those of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the US, or GDPR in Europe. Controlled data can even be flagged and stored in immutable buckets to help firms meet their compliance objectives.

Planning the move

Having decided on your architecture and provider, it’s time to plan for the actual migration. Consider how the work will affect any processes or workflows, and how to schedule the migration to minimise the impact. This is particularly important in a hybrid cloud or multi-cloud strategy, where careful orchestration of data flows between different architectures or providers is key to the success of the whole endeavour.

This is also where partnering with a good cloud storage provider can make all the difference. What tools does the provider supply or support to ease migration and make the process manageable? What kind of support can they deliver while you’re going through the process?

Many organisations typically begin with a pilot project – something not too complex or business critical, but with enough clear business benefit to help make the point for further migrations. This not only gives you a chance to trial your approach and isolate pitfalls, but test after migration to ensure no errors have crept in. This can help you avoid issues later or develop effective workarounds for any that emerge.

Backup, recovery and resilience need to be at the heart of the whole process, so think about how you can protect your data before, during and after the migration, and how you can lock and backup key data resources, so that you preserve and safeguard everything of value. In a hybrid cloud strategy, there may be scope to replicate data that is kept on-premises in the cloud, for disaster recovery and business continuity, though this will involve some careful data orchestration. Of course, you may have some degree of built-in data protection, depending on the service and provider. With Wasabi, for instance, each data object is encoded and distributed across independent disks when stored. This means that, should one disk fail, the original data object can still be reconstructed, giving you resiliency without the need to store a full duplicate version of every object in the cloud.

How you tackle the actual migration will depend on the connectivity you have available, and the quantities of data involved. For most businesses and use cases, existing connectivity and the public internet will be fine, but there may be options for dedicated or direct connections where large quantities of data must be shifted. Some providers even offer a physical method for migrating large data libraries. Wasabi’s Wasabi Ball Transfer Appliance, for example, simply connects to the local network, after which you can copy over the data you’re migrating, then ship the appliance back to Wasabi for copying directly to the cloud.

Once the data is migrated, focus on the testing. Make sure all the data is there, that it’s secured and managed appropriately, and that any applications that rely on it are working reliably without any impact on performance. It’s the lessons you learn during this phase that could help you ensure that your migration is a success, and that the same goes for any future migrations too.

Growing into the future

Our dependence on cloud storage is growing across the board, thanks to numerous factors from the value and convenience it offers to the expansion of the data economy and the development of our new distributed-working paradigms. Cloud storage usage is only going to increase exponentially as time goes on.

To enable your business to grow and change rapidly without sacrificing your data, a service like Wasabi that offers flexible, responsive and unlimited cloud storage is a must. Unlimited storage means that you won’t hit a wall during times when quick expansion is essential – instead, you can rely on your service to support your growth. If the last year has taught us anything, it’s the importance of flexibility in the face of unanticipated change. Selecting the most suitable cloud storage provider is key to effectively managing your data and ensuring business continuity and resilience.

By preparing carefully and systematically for migration, you will put your organisation in the best position to take advantage of the cloud storage boom and all the benefits it can offer. With the right provider to support you, you can be confident that your data is future proofed.

Learn more about Wasabi’s cloud storage service

Most organisations are already aware of the benefits of cloud migration. It enables them to expand their business whilst using existing infrastructure and can have a positive impact on data growth and customer experience.

Not only that, but the cloud can also offer enhanced security and increase productivity, which is why IT leaders are all including the cloud as part of their digital transformation strategy, accelerated in part by the pandemic.

The cloud helped businesses through massive disruption, and having successfully continued operations, the cloud has shown resilience and the reason why cloud adoption will continue to grow, with spending on public cloud services expected to reach $396 billion in 2021, growing a further 21.7% in 2022 to reach $482 billion, according to Gartner, Inc.

But with all that the cloud has enabled, and continues to offer, could businesses end up burdened by hidden costs in the years to come?

Vendors can make their cloud offerings appear considerably more cost-effective than in-house solutions, but if business owners don’t need to take advantage of the complete technology that the cloud offers, the cost of adoption may be greater than necessary.

For example, there’s the risk of cloud outages that impact downtime (infrequent, but possible) so if you’re thinking about moving operations to the cloud, it’s critical that you’re aware of as many of the hidden costs as possible.

Unexpected costs of migrating to the cloud

Cloud migration is never a simple process. Pitfalls can wait either in plain sight - such as upfront monetary costs, often large but easily legislated for - or in the shadows. It’s these hidden costs that are the real debilitator. Without thorough planning or technical understanding, enterprises may find themselves far over budget and too deep to escape.

Hidden costs often appear in the form of operational and recurring expenditures, such as the pay-as-you-go cloud model offered by vendors. Without the required level of expertise within the enterprise, pay-as-you-go models may be misunderstood.

Enterprises can pay for vast amounts of cloud storage to house swathes of data. With no storage limit, data will continue to be stored on the cloud servers, bringing an incremental cost. What’s more, it’s likely that most of this data doesn’t need to be stored in the cloud. On-premise servers still have a role to play, while many enterprises are guilty of blanket decisions when it comes to data, rather than taking the time to sift through what’s relevant and important to maintain.

To shine a light on this blind spot, enterprises must ensure their in-house IT departments are brimming with relevant expertise. Existing employees can be upskilled to plug skills gaps, but sooner or later there will be a problem or a technology that stretches the department to breaking point.

Acquiring external talent at some point down the road is unavoidable, in the form of consultants, new hires, and vendor support. Due to the unpredictability of cloud migrations, both in terms of surfacing issues and in the introduction of emerging technologies, having the foresight to realise which specific skills are going to be required down the line is not always apparent, adding to this expense.

This unpredictability stems from the fact that organisations will want to tailor their cloud technology to integrate seamlessly with their existing set of systems. As the web of infrastructure expands, it becomes more difficult to maintain optimum performance levels because of the complexity that customisation brings. As deployments are scaled, their problems and complexities are also magnified, forcing the enterprise to invest in additional resources.

How to calculate whether you can afford cloud migration

Though the specific amount of hidden costs remain a mystery until they are encountered, that doesn’t mean that when devising a cloud migration budget, they shouldn’t be accounted for. Budgets should have the buffering capacity and be scalable, just like the cloud technology it will be invested in.

It's certain that the cloud migration journey is by nature unpredictable, yet there is one consistent element that can be counted on: change. The enterprise and cloud migrations are both dynamic. Performance requirements, changes in usage and market needs, vendor support packages, will all be affected at one point or another.

This acts as one of the major advantages and disadvantages of the cloud. On the other hand, on-premise infrastructures also suffer from these faults.

Enterprises can start their cloud journeys by taking an audit of current IT infrastructure costs in order to reveal what they are currently paying. Then try and estimate the potential cloud infrastructure costs. For this there must be an understanding of the network, storage, and database capacity required to run applications selected to operate on the cloud, Typically cloud pricing structures are quite complex, however, vendors are increasingly simplifying their offerings.

Weighing the pros and cons of cloud migration

With the costs of cloud migration identified, it’s up to the individual enterprise only to decide whether the journey is worthwhile. Budgets, industries, and priorities vary, but what is certain is that at least partial migrations to the cloud will bring a host of benefits that ultimately do make businesses more competitive.

For those struggling to finance migrations, it may be time to look for more cost-effective methods. Cloud migrations do not need to happen en masse. Internal inspections can dictate which applications will benefit the most from integrating with the cloud. If the value isn’t foreseen in transferring a certain application, then don’t.

Of course, risk is a factor in every decision, particularly one with high financial implications. Enterprises can complete a thorough risk analysis by uncovering the hidden costs of their planned cloud migration and comparing them to existing costs and their risk appetite. Risks can’t be eradicated but they can be accounted for.

One of the most noticeable technology trends over the last few years has been the adoption of cloud services, as businesses look to transform themselves digitally and keep up with the competition.

Offering a vast number of benefits - from enhanced security, reduced costs, increased productivity, and greater scalability and innovation - the cloud helped organisations stay operational during the disruptions of the pandemic, and continues to appeal to companies that want to proof themselves from any future uncertainties.

Cloud capabilities allowed businesses to support their remote workforces with their storage and collaboration tools, removing geographical barriers and empowering staff to make decisions with the data available to them. This not only boosted employee morale, having autonomy and trust from their company, but it also enhanced their customer service offering, which in turn increased profitability.

With the options available, IT professionals have the ability to pick and choose the cloud elements that are most valuable to them, aligning with specific business needs. A multi-cloud approach can offer this, so companies don’t need to depend on a singular cloud provider, but instead choose from several vendors in order to get the best solution from each.

It also means being able to save costs, as organisations can select certain services based on who is offering the lowest price at the time.

The multi-cloud concept

As the name would suggest, at its most base level, multi-cloud refers to the practice of using multiple cloud services at the same time.

This shouldn't be confused with hybrid cloud, which involves mixing public and private cloud platforms to extract the benefits of both rather than opting for one over the other. Rather, multi-cloud combines multiple public and private cloud environments, each chosen with a specific workload or set of workloads in mind.

For example, an organisation might use a private cloud to house its most sensitive data or information that needs to stay within specific national borders as per data regulations such as GDPR. At the same time it might use Salesforce's cloud-based customer relationship management services to handle its CRM functions, while Google's G Suite or Microsoft's Office 365 provide the productivity tools for an organisation that wishes to facilitate easy document sharing and collaboration for its employees.

The same company's website could be hosted on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure public cloud infrastructure, with the scope to scale compute resources depending on demand. App development and testing, meanwhile, could be carried out on the IBM Cloud, supporting DevOps teams as they create cloud-based apps.

Given many businesses are now data rich, a private deployment of the SAP Cloud Platform, which includes the HANA in-memory relational database management system, could be used to not only process that data in a secure cloud-based environment, but also run analytics on it to gain useful business insights.

Finally, if the organisation uses a lot of contractors, then cloud-based virtual machines from the likes of VMWare could be used to spin up virtual desktops and apps for them to use, without needing to provide dedicated hardware-linked desktops and workplaces.

Having a multi-cloud infrastructure is arguably a means by which to drive digital transformation within an organisation without running the risk of opting for a few services that do not quite fit the demands of an enterprise.

What are the benefits of multi-cloud?

The most prominent benefit of multi-cloud is flexibility. Given the myriad cloud services out in the market, with each one offering all manner of different services and features, it can be difficult just to select one or two and be sure you have the best suite of digital services and cloud-based infrastructure in place.

As such, being able to essentially mix and match different cloud services can lead to a more comprehensive cloud strategy than if just a couple of "comprehensive" products were chosen. The multi-cloud approach also has the flexibility to allow for change in some areas without needing to overhaul or migrate entire swathes of infrastructure or data from one core cloud service to another.

A multi-cloud approach also avoids vendor lock-in, whereby an organisation is beholden to using a limited number of cloud services due to the function and technology they provide and thus at the mercy of the provider ramping up its prices or forcing unpalatable service agreements on its existing customers.

What are the disadvantages of multi-cloud?

With flexibility comes complexity, and that is the most prominent disadvantage of a multi-cloud infrastructure.

While managing cloud services and infrastructure has become more streamlined in recent years, having several to look after at the same time is never going to be a simple task.

Managing a complex portfolio of cloud services can end up putting increased strain on an IT team, rather than freeing them up to pursue one of the great promises of the cloud: Pursuing tasks and technologies that provide a more direct benefit to the business.

There are services that can provide management systems to oversee and control multiple cloud services at once, delivering a so-called "single pane of glass" from which all cloud services in an organisation's operation can be managed from. Of course, this is an additional cost that will need to be considered when deciding whether to take a multi-cloud approach to IT.

Indeed, cost in general is another major disadvantage of multi-cloud: Having multiple specialised cloud services and systems rather than a couple of heavily-featured cloud platforms, could be an expensive undertaking. As such, there needs to be a balance of cost per service and the advantages specialised cloud systems can deliver.

Managed service providers can help here, bundling multiple cloud services into a single package and thereby keeping overall costs manageable, but again an IT team and other business decision-makers will need to measure up the costs versus benefits.

Regardless of the advantages and disadvantages of a multi-cloud approach, more companies appear to be taking their IT strategies down that route, with IBM noting that 85% of organisations now use a multi-cloud IT model.

As such, if your business is undertaking a digital transformation push, then the multi-cloud approach is worth giving some careful consideration.

It doesn’t matter how prepared we are, we live in a world where a disaster will unfortunately occur, whether that be a security breach, data corruption or hardware failure. So when fate does come knocking, it’s essential to have a disaster recovery (DR) plan in place so that everyone knows what to do, and the impact is reduced.

When creating a recovery plan, it’s important to consider all areas of business operations that could be disrupted by an unplanned incident. This includes data centres, networks, and even the cloud, all of which could negatively impact not only your employee experiences, but also your customers, and ultimately your income.

Having a structured DR plan can mean your business can minimise any destructive downtime in the short-term, and get operations back up and running quickly, which can also contribute to successful longer-term recuperation.

It’s all about identifying risk, deciding what apps and documentation are critical to the business, and ensuring there are backup procedures in place, all of which should be reviewed regularly.

So if you’ve already got a DR plan in place and need to review its core components, or if you’re looking to develop one for the first time, the following nine tips aim to guide you through your disaster recovery plan creation, and ensure your organisation is ready for when disaster strikes.

1. Have full documentation

Paperwork is never fun, but documenting your DR plan is a vital component of full, quick recoveries.

Documentation should include the purpose and methods of the recovery plan, the steps for each tactic, each role’s responsibilities, and the roles involved in each stage of the plan. Language should be clear and simple so that anyone could follow instructions, and senior management should sign off on a clear chain of command in case of a disaster.

Without a document of your strategy, it can be extremely disruptive if the person in charge of disaster recovery leaves the company or can’t be reached during a disaster, so this first step must be implemented right away.

2. Assess the risks

All the best-implemented things in business start with a risk assessment, and disaster recovery is no exception. A good DR strategy will consider all the functional areas of the business, asking what potential threats they face and what IT resources are relied on.

A full IT inventory and data audit can help with this task by identifying both critical software applications, and any hardware infrastructure needed to run them.

A risk assessment should also consider any issues that might affect external partners and service vendors, especially in cloud environments, which in turn will form the basis of your disaster recovery plan.

3. Drill for disaster

Having an evacuation strategy for your building won't stop a fire from happening, but regular fire drills mean that when the alarm goes off, everyone knows what to do and where to be, and will all theoretically get out safely.

A disaster recovery strategy needs the same treatment, with regular, periodic testing to ensure each process and system works as it should. Having an effective DR plan in place is the goal, but it's much more reassuring to know that it will be followed, should the worst happen.

4. Prepare for different disaster levels

There are many different types and scales of disaster, and sometimes just a small disaster can lead to a longer outage if organisations aren't prepared.

A good DR strategy will have different levels of response detailed for different levels of disaster, ensuring that smaller problems can get the right teams dealing with them straight away.

5. Consider the cloud

Yes, disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) is a thing. Not all cloud-based disaster recovery systems are the same or work the same way; some offer cloud-based backup and recovery, while others use virtualisation to maintain a copy of your servers and applications, while data is replicated from production systems to the virtualised failover systems.

Cloud DR has its pros and cons, but as with many cloud-based services, it's accessible to a wide range of businesses without the upfront investment costs of backup and recovery hardware.

6. Prioritise resilience

Disaster recovery is one of the IT services organisations pay for in the hope it never gets used. That's why it's important to make resilience a guiding principle in your IT infrastructure.

Ensuring your infrastructure is resilient comes down to a combination of good practice and investment in technologies and services that both support the business and minimise any risk of failure.

The most important principle when aiming for resilience is to avoid having single points of failure. If a key application runs from a single server, and can only run from that server, then that's a potential weak spot.

As part of your disaster recovery strategy, assess the resilience of both the hardware and software in your organisation and see if there are any areas for improvement.

Failover connectivity, uninterruptible power supplies, backup generators and backup servers can all help reduce the risk of failure.

7. Evaluate security practices

Security is a separate topic in itself but is inextricably linked with your disaster recovery strategy. In theory, good security practices will minimise the risk of that DR plan ever having to be enforced.

Nonetheless, as part of a comprehensive DR strategy, potential weaknesses in security should be evaluated, and action taken if necessary to strengthen them, as well as a plan for what happens should particular defences be breached.

8. Revise and revisit

It's tempting to shelve your DR plan once it's all in place. But as quickly as new technologies are adopted, new staff come on board and situations within the business change, so the strategy should be revised.

If a new cloud technology is implemented for example, a disaster recovery plan should be updated with the specific strategy for that particular tool, including how and where the data is being backed up, and how to recover it.

9. Build a critical response team

A step-by-step recovery strategy cannot be implemented without the personnel needed to bring systems back online. A critical response team should include any external contacts, such as software vendors, in addition to existing internal staff.

Disaster recovery roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined, highlighting the need for comprehensive documentation and training. Larger enterprises with more distributed resources and expertise will find themselves better able to action a recovery plan as they can leverage resources from multiple locations, depending on the type and location of disaster experienced.

Ironically, it’s best practice here to backup your backup team. Through ensuring that each role within the team has a shadow member, you can rest assured that in an untimely case of disaster, there is somebody who can still step in to fill the vacant role.

Communication across the team must also be considered. Having multiple ways of contacting each member, and having contact details clearly marked on the recovery plan itself can enable a rapid, effective response.

With cyber attacks frequently making headlines, and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming into force last year leading organisations to look closer at how they securely store data, it's understandable that businesses are making disaster recovery and business continuity a high priority.

At one end of the scale, unplanned downtime can lead to a drop in productivity and a heavy cost - it's estimated that, depending on the size of the organisation, a one-hour outage could cost a business as much as 100,000. At the other end, there's the potential for data loss or theft, opening up the business to legal and financial ramifications and reputational damage.

There's also the pressure of keeping an 'always on' service. Analyst firm Gartner notes that with the rise in digital business initiatives and online interactions, IT availability requirements are being driven towards 100%. To minimise the impact of failures, business recovery time objectives (RTOs) are dropping from days to hours.

In a worst-case scenario, IDC research director Phil Goodwin says that somewhere in the neighbourhood of 80% of organisations without a disaster recovery plan in place will fail entirely in the face of a disaster.

Disasters can take a wide variety of forms. Often natural disasters such as floods or storms come to mind, but more often than not, the ones businesses face are man-made, taking the form of human errors or cyber attacks. But even small disasters can lead to long outages.

Organisations should prepare for all contingencies, and a solid disaster recovery plan aims to determine how a business responds to and mitigates against unplanned downtime in myriad ways, including data protection and backup.

Is cloud-based backup becoming the norm?

For many years, larger enterprises have recognised and responded to the potential impact an IT failure could have, investing heavily in solutions - including those based on cloud technology - to protect against disasters. This has led to a dramatic drop in the price of reduced storage and backups, making cloud-based solutions more accessible, especially to the SMB market.

"Until recently, disaster recovery didn't get the attention it deserved from businesses because of the cost and complexity of doing it right. Moreover, business units didn't see a direct benefit from disaster recovery - until a disaster occurred," says Wayne Horkan, an executive on the Institute of Engineering and Technology's (IET's) information and communications sector.

"With the emergence of cloud computing, there are now full-blown disaster recovery solutions available to small, medium-sized, and large businesses alike that help companies reduce costs without sacrificing service. Businesses today are more comfortable with replicating their data to the cloud. They understand its usefulness and ease of access."

Disaster recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)

Cloud-based services are making businesses rethink their traditional data protection and disaster recovery plans as, if they have strong connectivity, these can help them reduce data centre infrastructure costs and complexity. It's in this area that vendors are seeing a growing interest in cloud-based solutions such as Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), where applications and data are copied to and stored on the provider's infrastrucure on the cloud. If a catastrophic failure occurs, the backup can simply be activated and pressed into action within minutes.

"A natural progression in business continuity would be to extend beyond cloud-based backups into cloud-facilitated DRaaS options," says David Bird, editorial contributor for BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT. "Financially, it certainly might appear to be a more viable option compared to using traditional mirroring/replication models to a failover hot site."

Big names like Amazon and Microsoft are already in the game and Gartner is seeing the DRaaS market becoming increasingly commoditised, with 25% year-on-year growth expected for the coming years.

It can be a minefield for businesses though, as hundreds of vendors are offering a wide range of DRaaS options from fully managed through to self-service models.

"There's a tremendous amount of competition and variability," notes Goodwin, whose focus at IDC is on cloud data management and protection. "There are organisations at one end of the spectrum that do little more than provide on-demand services and from there it's entirely 'build your own'. Then there are what we call 'white glove' suppliers who come in and do threat analysis, [and will] be there for every step. Of course, there are many variations in-between."

How to decide if a cloud-based option is right for you

Whatever the size of your business, it's important to do your research before implementing a cloud solution, as with any technology it has its pros and cons. Not all cloud-based DR solutions are the same or work the same way. In many circumstances, the best disaster recovery solution is a hybrid of cloud and on-site technologies.

On the plus side, cloud-based data protection and backup offers reduced cost and improved agility and frees up the time of IT staff - instead of taking care of backup infrastructure they're free to focus on other aspects of the business.

It also enables organisations to recover their data quickly, negating the need to wait for on-premise servers to be recovered.

"It offers resilience, and if you spread it across multiple providers you're even more resilient," notes Stuart Mackintosh, chair of OpenUK, the free and open source technology industry association. However, he adds that if you do use multiple providers, there needs to be a degree of separation between them as many use the same back-end service.

Another advantage over older, hardware-based forms of DR is cost. With cloud, there's no need to set up failover systems and network infrastructure at a secondary site, or have the added cost of maintaining those systems. Instead, the DR partner manages the infrastructure - with the added benefit that businesses only pay for the storage capacity they need at the time, when they need to use it.

On the downside, cloud solutions aren't impervious to disasters of their own and you have to consider how your business will access the cloud if the disaster involves a lack of connectivity. Horkan also highlights issues around vendor lock-in and a lack of control.

"It can be difficult to migrate data to another cloud provider at a later date," he points out. "[Plus,] since data is held off site by a company you do not control, you lack the ability to control and customise your data storage set-up, an issue for larger businesses that have complex needs."

Do your due diligence

There are many issues to consider, but one of the main associated challenges is ensuring the requirements of the business are understood and the costs are accurately estimated. To get this right you have to do due diligence.

Mackintosh recommends businesses ask themselves the following questions.

"Ask yourself what you're trying to do, what you want the outcome to be. This is never 'having disaster recovery' - that's just a tool. You need to understand your RTOs and recovery point objectives (RPOs) and map these to your business objectives. Are you looking at restoring all services? How much data can you lose?

"Also ensure vendor transparency. It's easy to buy something off the shelf and tick a compliance box. Take responsibility and ensure you understand what's on offer. Finally, it's important to test your disaster recovery plan - it's only as good as your last restoration," he adds. "That's when you might find out you're not able to recover all the data you expected to. Or, in the case of big data, you might discover that it takes a week to restore all your data!"

Much depends on the cloud provider and on the SLAs involved. Can they guarantee high availability? What recourse do you have if they fall short? Will there be contention, or will your applications get the resources they need to run effectively? If businesses can get satisfactory answers to these questions, a more resilient infrastructure is within reach.

This article was originally published in February 2018, and has since been updated to include additional information