5 Hot Takeaways from Tuesday’s Interop Digital Event
Discussion centered around hybrid cloud, ransomware, data management and disaster recovery.
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Organizations house data in myriad different places — employees’ personal files, the business’ servers, social media feeds, website clicks, IoT sensors and more. As a result, IT teams have to design the right platforms to accommodate all that distribution. Hybrid cloud, says Omdia’s Dennis Hahn, deliver the answer.
Hahn, senior analyst for data center storage, led the keynote at Tuesday’s virtual Interop event. The need to corral data will translate into a hybrid cloud and multicloud management sector worth more than $14 billion by 2023, according to figures from Omdia. (Omdia and Channel Futures share parent company Informa.) As data spreads across an organization and IT teams seek to wrangle and understand it, hybrid cloud will provide the means to properly store, analyze and act on all that information. Enable service modeling and financial management to keep everything in check, Hahn said.
“As we all know, cloud can get out of hand very quickly,” he said.
One of the biggest challenges lies in collecting and understanding all the data organizations generate. Data must provide business value.
This leads to a couple of issues. First, “the quality of data is becoming a real problem,” as Omdia’s Hahn noted — garbage in, garbage out, he said. Second, IT teams — the people responsible for evaluating and recommending next steps on data — have a lot of their plates. The solution? Instill automation and artificial intelligence. These additions will make data easier to manage, and make it smarter, said Hahn.
Another critical aspect of data management goes beyond where it lies and into the arena of security. Organizations have to shore up their data protections, and the underlying systems and infrastructure against breaches.
“Invariably, the No. 1 threat is ransomware,” said Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting. “Everyone’s going to have to deal with it at some point.”
Staimer joined Pete Renneker, technical resilience leader at Deloitte, and Lisa Schmeiser, senior editor of ITPro Today (an Informa publication) in discussing disaster recovery in a dangerous world.
Renneker agreed with Staimer, adding that ransomware events aren’t just more frequent these days, they’re increasingly more devastating.
“An outage at one location … can cascade across the organization, across an ecosystem,” he said. “We’re so interdependent.”
So how do organizations better protect themselves against ransomware? Start by bringing disparate teams together.
“Ransomware is not entirely an IT problem, not entirely a disaster recovery problem,” Renneker said. Everyone in the business needs to “come together … and prioritize investments in the right way.”
Conduct a cyber war game, he said. This will highlight problems, and show the organization what it does well and where it needs to improve.
“It’s really about bridging gaps in existing domains,” Renneker said.
Next, Staimer said, know that fighting ransomware takes a hands-on approach.
“Ransomware is top to bottom. You have to train your people not to fall for targeted phishing ,” he said.
There is no single answer, Renneker said. But, he said, “with a coordinated, organized and well thought-out strategy, you can combat this threat.”
Ransomware has gotten tricky and devilish. It now can embed itself in backups and hide in immutable and air-gapped storage.
“Ransomware doesn’t just encrypt your data, it steals it too,” Staimer said.
Organizations will not outrun the hackers, many of whom are part of organized crime syndicates with lots of money and reach. So, instead of thinking about how to outsmart attackers, make accessing the organization’s data difficult. This calls for a multilayered defense, Staimer and Renneker told Interop Digital attendees. Think about resiliency and overall system design throughout the ecosystem and its many intricate pieces — cloud, mobility, network, apps, sensors and so on.
“This is a problem that is certainly here to stay,” Renneker said.
Ransomware has gotten tricky and devilish. It now can embed itself in backups and hide in immutable and air-gapped storage.
“Ransomware doesn’t just encrypt your data, it steals it too,” Staimer said.
Organizations will not outrun the hackers, many of whom are part of organized crime syndicates with lots of money and reach. So, instead of thinking about how to outsmart attackers, make accessing the organization’s data difficult. This calls for a multilayered defense, Staimer and Renneker told Interop Digital attendees. Think about resiliency and overall system design throughout the ecosystem and its many intricate pieces — cloud, mobility, network, apps, sensors and so on.
“This is a problem that is certainly here to stay,” Renneker said.
INTEROP DIGITAL — The shift to hybrid cloud and the ramped-up threat of ransomware took center stage at Interop Digital on Tuesday. (The event is run by Informa Tech, the parent company of Channel Futures.)
Sandwiched in between those big topics lay discussion of storage, data management and disaster recovery. Above all, IT professionals – which include managed service providers, VARs and other channel partners – have to consider the best setups for themselves and their clients. Then they have to make sure everything is as impenetrable as possible, including employee education. That’s where hybrid cloud dominated the agenda, alongside the equally important topic of cybersecurity.
The slideshow above features the most prescient takeaways from today’s Interop Digital event.
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