ST2401

More documents

Recommendations

Info

FEATURE: FEATURE: 2024 PREDICTIONS "These advanced storage systems will prioritise continuous replication to air-gapped storage, effectively isolating critical data from potential cyber-attacks. This strategy will be key in safeguarding against ransomware and targeted cyber-attacks, ensuring data integrity and business continuity even during cyber incidents."- Aron Brand, CTERA "However, all of this hype means that for some organisations, adoption of this technology is more of a matter of 'keeping up with the Jones' rather than because it is truly the best solution for a specific problem they are trying to solve. As a result, we're likely to see a lot of money invested in failed generative AI projects. It's the shiny new object and many CIOs and other senior leaders may feel pressured to be able to say they have a generative AI program in place. The key to limiting these failed projects will lie in really ensuring that your organisation understands the specific reason for using generative AI, that it's tied to a defined business outcome and there's a method established for measuring the success of the investment." PROTECT AND SURVIVE The other topic on almost everyone's lips for 2024 was, as we mentioned, cyber attacks and data protection. "IT admins will need to rise to new challenges in data protection with increased vigilance, for example, by improving infrastructure visibility with continuous IT monitoring tools, and strengthening access and identity controls across the infrastructure," says Sergei Serdyuk of Nakivo. "Organisations that achieve ransomware resiliency in 2024 will have successfully applied anti-ransomware measures to backup data, including tiering and immutable storage, as well as anomaly detection tools to detect dormant malware in backup data." Jim McGann of Index Engines describes how storage vendors are bolstering their platforms with advanced cybersecurity features: "Going beyond conventional measures like immutability and authentication, these enhancements aim to restore data to operational status while minimising loss. This entails continuous data inspection, ensuring integrity, reporting on any signs of corruption in real time, and quickly restoring the last known unaltered version of data post-attack. This convergence of security and storage, 'cyberstorage,' is emerging and gaining traction, not just in 2024 but for the foreseeable future." Nasuni's Jim Liddle comments: "Preventing the theft, encryption, misuse, or exposure of sensitive data will remain a daily concern for organisations indefinitely. Multi-layer protection has quickly become a matter of hygiene and even companies that invested in sophisticated, global ransomware protection products will need a belt and braces approach in the form of network, application, and access security, coupled with rapid data recovery solutions." We will start to see storage vendors pivot towards developing 'cyber-hardened' storage solutions in response to the escalating cyber threat landscape, says Ctera's Aron Brand: "These advanced storage systems will prioritise continuous replication to airgapped storage, effectively isolating critical data from potential cyber-attacks. This strategy will be key in safeguarding against ransomware and targeted cyber-attacks, ensuring data integrity and business continuity even during cyber incidents." Simultaneously, predictive threat detection powered by - you guessed it - AI, will become integral to these storage solutions, says Brand: "AI's advanced anomaly recognition capabilities will enable early detection of potential threats, offering a proactive defence mechanism. This will be complemented by built-in disaster recovery features, ensuring swift response and recovery in the event of a breach." In recent years, the tech industry has made tremendous strides in protecting data against all manner of threats, including increasingly destructive malware and ransomware, argues Giorgio Regni of Scality, exemplified by the rise of immutability in data protection and data storage solutions, especially for backup data: "While data protection and restoration are a major cornerstone that serves as a critical last line of defence in a layered cybersecurity infrastructure, new advancements in AI-generated ransomware detection capabilities will emerge in data protection and storage solutions in 2024." 12 STORAGE Jan/Feb 2024 @STMagAndAwards www.storagemagazine.co.uk MAGAZINE
FEATURE: FEATURE: 2024 PREDICTIONS "There's a lot of hype right now around generative AI, to put it mildly. However, all of this hype means that for some organisations, adoption of this technology is more of a matter of 'keeping up with the Jones' rather than because it is truly the best solution for a specific problem they are trying to solve. As a result, we're likely to see a lot of money invested in failed generative AI projects." - Rex Ahlstrom, Syniti Gaidar Magdanurov of Acronis described what he calls 'holistic cyber protection': "Cyber protection - integrated cybersecurity and backup - has become table stakes for cyber defences. Given the widespread use of AI and automation, I predict that more multi-layered defence tactics will become the norm to avoid large-scale attacks that are customised through AI. This includes integrating various measures, such as prevention with vulnerability assessment and patch management, detection with Endpoint Detection and Response solutions, remediation including recovery from a backup, and forensics using the data from backups." Brock Mowry of Tintri adds a sobering note: "Bad actors are doing their R&D. 2024 will see new and undiscovered attack vectors leveraging the intelligence and power of AI. This will be the new adversary of blue teams in the enterprise." THE HARD DISK DEBATE CONTINUES What about the ever-present discussion of hard disk versus flash? Declining flash prices are at last likely to mean a broad-scale transition towards all-flash object storage systems. Steve Leeper of Datadobi says: "As flash storage becomes more financially accessible, its integration into object storage infrastructures is likely to become the norm, offering the swift performance that traditional HDD-based object storage and scalability that NAS systems lack. This evolution will be particularly beneficial for handling the large datasets integral to AI workloads, which necessitate rapid throughput and scalability. Consequently, a data mobility wave may be seen, with datasets and workloads being transferred from outdated and sluggish storage architectures to cutting-edge all-flash object storage solutions." Not everyone agrees though. Brett Davis of iXsystems comments: "Despite the wishful thinking from flash-only vendors, hard drives in the data centre will maintain their significant cost advantage and continue to store the most data. As a provider of both all-flash and hybrid storage, we believe hybrid disk/flash storage is still best suited in many circumstances.. Allflash and disk-only configurations definitely have their places, though we predict hybrid storage will continue to remain the most popular choice through 2024 and beyond. It could be another decade until flash storage can be produced in enough volume to rival the cost-effectiveness of hard drives." Toshiba's Rainer Kaese argues, perhaps predictably, for the hard disk: "Hard disk drives are a tried and trusted data storage technology that has stood the test of time… At present, HDDs maintain a gap in cost per capacity with flash storage of around a factor of seven. This advantage remains the lifeline of the HDD. There is little point in adding more capacity if costs rise exponentially. Indeed, these efforts mean HDDs may reach 40 or even 50 terabytes without approaching comparable costs with flash storage." Giorgio Regni of Scality agrees: "While flash media and solid state drives (SSDs) have clear benefits when it comes to latency, are making major strides in density, and the cost per GB is declining, we see HDDs holding a 3-5x density/cost advantage over high-density SSDs through 2028. Therefore, the current call for HDD end-of-life is akin to the tape-is-dead arguments from 20 years ago. In a similar way, HDDs will likely survive for the foreseeable future as they continue to provide workload-specific value." GREENER OUTLOOKS Toshiba's Kaese also brought up a topic touched upon by several of our experts, sustainability and energy efficiency: "Regarding energy efficiency, if you want to spin a storage disk at a certain speed and access it at a specific rate, you inevitably come up against the laws of physics, typically requiring about 10 watts per unit. Helium technology launched several years back helped cut that figure to around 7-8 watts. But the only way to become more energyefficient than that is to introduce more www.storagemagazine.co.uk @STMagAndAwards Jan/Feb 2024 STORAGE MAGAZINE 13
Page 1 and 2: STORAGE MAGAZINE The UK’s number
Page 3 and 4: The UK’s number one in IT Storage
Page 5 and 6: DON’T SaaSSS GET YOUR KICKED! ! T
Page 7 and 8: STRATEGY: STRATEGY: DATA MANAGEMENT
Page 9 and 10: CASE CASE STUDY: BRITVIC "Moving to
Page 11: FEATURE: FEATURE: 2024 PREDICTIONS
Page 15 and 16: REGISTER FOR YOUR FREE TICKET WWW.D
Page 17 and 18: TECHNOLOGY: RDMA "The secret to boo
Page 19 and 20: Hybrid storage architecture, optimi
Page 21 and 22: CASE STUDY: CASE STUDY: CANCER RESE
Page 23 and 24: The future is here. Tiered Backup S
Page 25 and 26: ROUNDTABLE: SOFTWARE "Convenience a
Page 27 and 28: ROUNDTABLE: SOFTWARE "For vendors,
Page 29 and 30: INDUSTRY FOCUS: MEDIA FOCUS: & ENTE
Page 31 and 32: Case Study Object Archive and Tape
Page 33 and 34: MANAGEMENT: RANSOMWARE "Backups are

ST2401

Create successful ePaper yourself

Delete template?

Save as template?