Page 93 - Cyber Defense eMagazine January 2023

2.) Consumer attitudes towards online security and privacy will heighten. A key driver here will be that
while enterprises getting hacked and hit by ransomware continue to make the headlines, cybercriminals
have begun to hit not just enterprise businesses with deep pockets, but SMBs and individuals. SMBs and
individuals/consumers are actually far more vulnerable to successful attacks as they do not have the
level of protection that larger enterprises have the budgets to employ. As work from home (WFH) and
work from anywhere (WFA) remain the paradigm for many across the data/analytics field, they will require
data protection and security solutions that can also protect them wherever they are.

In the coming year, The ideal cybercrime defense will be a layered defense that starts with a powerful
password, and continues with Unbreakable Backup. As mentioned, backup has become today’s cyber
criminals' first target via ransomware and other malware. An Unbreakable Backup solution however can
provide users with two of the most difficult hurdles for cyber criminals to overcome – immutable snapshots
and object locking. Immutable snapshots are by default, write-once read-many (WORM) but in the coming
year, sophisticated yet easy to manage features like encryption where the encryption keys are located in
an entirely different location than the data backup copy(ies) will become standard. And then to further
fortify the backup and thwart would be criminals in the coming year we will see users leveraging object
locking, so that data cannot be deleted or overwritten for a fixed time period, or even indefinitely.

Brian Dunagan, Vice President of Engineering, Retrospect

1.) Freedom and flexibility will become the mantra of virtually every data management professional in
the coming year. In particular, data management professionals will seek data mobility solutions that are
cloud-enabled and support data migration, data replication and data synchronization across mixed
environments including disk, tape and cloud to maximize ROI by eliminating data silos. We will likewise
see an uptick in solutions that support vendor-agnostic file replication and synchronization, are easily
deployed and managed on non-proprietary servers and can transfer millions of files simultaneously –
protecting data in transit to/from the cloud with SSL encryption.

2.) Ransomware will remain a huge and relentlessly growing global threat, to high profile targets and to
smaller SMBs and individuals as well. There are likely a few reasons for this continuing trend. Certainly,
one is that today’s ransomware is attacking widely, rapidly, aggressively, and randomly – especially with
ransomware as a service (RaaS) becoming increasingly prevalent, looking for any possible weakness in
defense. The second is that SMBs do not typically have the technology or manpower budget as their
enterprise counterparts.

While a strong security defense is indispensable, we will see that next year security leaders will ensure
additional measures are taken. Their next step will be enabling the ability to detect anomalies as early as
possible in order to remediate affected resources. Large enterprises, SMBs and individuals alike will need
a backup target that allows them to lock backups for a designated time period. Many of the major cloud
providers now support object locking, also referred to as Write-Once-Read-Many (WORM) storage or
immutable storage. Users will leverage the ability to mark objects as locked for a designated period of
time, and in doing so prevent them from being deleted or altered by any user - internal or external.

Cyber Defense eMagazine – January 2023 Edition 93
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