Home » Top 5 Emerging Technologies of 2019 that Challenge the Data Protection Market

Top 5 Emerging Technologies of 2019 that Challenge the Data Protection Market

Data is important for business. No matter what.

Benjamin Franklin said: “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” And what is certain in the ‘world’ of an organization?

Let’s try this: there are no irreplaceable people (if you know where to look for them). Secondly, we should not trust in (the reliability of) technology. Why? Because these are only resources that are to help us implement our plan within the organization. Imagine now that all your employees are leaving in one day and you did not expect that completely. In what time will your company regain operational efficiency? Similarly, we can look at a sudden event of a company’s IT infrastructure disaster. What if you suddenly lose all of your data? People can be replaced, but lost data cannot. The fact is that the second scenario happens more often than it seems.

Disaster Recovery Plan

A vast majority of small businesses (up to 250 employees) do not have any disaster recovery plan. The reasons are the lack of awareness of how many factors can cause disaster. Furthermore, there is the (false) conviction that the costs associated with the implementation of such solutions are too big in comparison with the size of the organization (or amount of data). Of course, proven solutions that guarantee business continuity in the event of a disaster are not available for free. However, their cost depends on the size of the organization resources and, in practice, may be relatively small. Especially in the context of the benefits they bring to the company.

We need to make it clear that the scale of dangers to which businesses are exposed in the context of business continuity will grow in 2019. We can find a lot of information about the current or most common reasons for disaster. But a disaster event, in case of this article, applies rather to the gaps that have arisen due to new technologies, which we need to closely monitor and create solutions that will also secure these areas in the future.

Data protection – 5 problems of the future (but the future… is now)

Unpredictability of Blockchain

there are a few things that need to be highlighted. For an average user, or even for companies, blockchain is still too complicated. There is no “normalized” way of how we should use it, mainly beyond the cryptocurrency context. But indeed, it is the financial sector that has the biggest interest in developing understandable tools to use it for the transfer of funds (goods). It is the matter of the nearest future that such a transparent interface will be created and – what is more important – we will invent brand new blockchain applications. Of course, regarding data transparency that blockchain introduces, we can see a good answer for the GDPR fuss. Additionally, blockchain will play a dominant role in the field of identity verification and privacy protection. The problem that arises here is to what extent it will be possible to protect this data.

Data overload

The basis of whether we are talking about Big Data, Machine Learning or AI is actually DATA. These are the elements that play a key role in the so-called digital transformation. We are perfectly aware that it is usually not intuition or a leader’s insight that leads a company to a specific goal, but there is data to be developed accordingly.

“As recent data has shown, we have created 90% of the world’s data in the past year. Research also shows that we are only using 1% of the data effectively” – said Daniel Newman, CEO of Broadsuite Media Group and principal analyst of Futurum Research.

Therefore, access to data, its proper storage and processing, control and protection will remain an invariably fresh topic in the market. Not only are there no programs available that would extract information of interest to us, but the data itself will become the company’s most valuable resource. Because data overload is just a matter of time…

Multi-cloud complexity

The truth is, we can no longer follow one path. We need to mix solutions to improve and develop our companies. It is not about storage any more. It is about VM, app deployment, containers, security, EFSS, hybrid-cloud solutions and so on… The number of organizations that use only one cloud shrinks very quickly. In larger companies, four cloud environments are used on average.

“Throughout the industry today, multi-cloud appears to be the dominant infrastructure strategy model: 8 out of 10 companies use hybrid cloud – a combination of private and public cloud environments. 71% of companies use more than three different clouds. In fact, if you count shadow IT or department-level cloud usage, then the average company uses five different clouds” – said Richard Wallace, Business Development Consultant Data Protection and Access

What you need is an easy way to manage clouds and local data centers that are stored, processed and shared there. From a strategic point of view, it leads to a situation in which it will be easy for us to run a local work environment in the cloud or on an external server. This is a necessary step toward business continuity in the event of a disaster. So we should rather consider multi-cloud as a strategy than a solution.

The Industry 4.0 revolution

Maybe “industry” is not the best word here because solutions that are part of this group appear in the context of smart houses, smart cities, autonomous vehicles… the scale is huge. What solutions are we talking about that allow you to create a connected network? Big Data, IoT, Cloud Computing, Cybersecurity, System Integration, Augmented and Virtual Reality, Robots… In this context, many innovative IT departments are connected and able to communicate with one another. In these operations, huge amounts of data are generated. Processing data in the cloud is definitely not enough. What counts here is time. That is why new solutions like edge computing and fog networking are emerging. Real-time data processing is key. Therefore, systems that can protect these huge amounts of data are crucial not only for the organization. Actually, human life depends on them.

Quantum computers attacks

Ultra-fast computers count not only when searching for and processing information. With some anxiety, we look towards artificial intelligence. But this is a different topic. Another important context is the fact that we cannot predict how the use of this technology will affect the security of our data. It is possible that common encryption methods will not stand a chance against quantum computers.

Conclusion

With the development of IT infrastructures and the sophistication and complexity of technology, generating huge amounts of data on tens, hundreds and thousands of devices working for a given organization – the case looks serious. In addition, every developing business begins to use new tools over time to influence the effectiveness of its operations.

First of all, we are looking for solutions that will allow us to control this scattered yet connected areas. The administration of devices, processes and data access is very important. Its importance will only grow. That is why we have to remember about the Disaster Recovery Plan as an important part of the company’s strategy.
Secondly, we want to do it in a safe way and be sure that we will not lose data in the event of any error, be it human or software. Therefore, we must have a system that allows us to secure data. Consequently, we have to double the security.
Thirdly, we want to be sure that when problems arise, we are able to immediately continue our work in a ‘mirror’ environment or return in a fraction of a second to an environment snapshot created some time ago. In this example, it is worth emphasizing that we use many services and a lot of applications in which we store our data. In situations where time matters, unification combined with the versatility of tools play an important role.

There are many areas that draw our attention. From the above examples, we can see that there are also areas where we can easily secure our data either on endpoints and VMs or in clouds, and easily recover them in case of a disaster. However, we assume that clients will look for ready-made solutions soon that will cover new areas and, in return, will leave them with peace and confidence that everything is going in the right direction.