The world of storage and backup has seen major changes this year, some for economic reasons, some for cyber threats, and some for modernization.
Three trends stand out. First, the ransomware threat continues to affect backup and storage vendors’ offerings. Second, many organizations have re-evaluated how they distribute workloads between cloud and on-premises storage. Finally, the container is heated up.
Vendors Get More Serious About Ransomware
Now that 2022 is coming to an end, it’s official: backups and storage are still ransomware lures that lure hackers. One clear sign that ransomware remains a dilemma is how aggressively vendors are adding new features to their products to thwart hackers. Vendors have also started offering ransomware recovery guarantees to customers.
Backup and recovery vendor Rubrik is responsible for the Ransomware Recovery Guarantee, promising to pay the company up to $5 million for its Enterprise Edition and Cloud Vault products as long as customers follow the rules. Other vendors have since followed suit, including Druva and AvePoint.
The fact that backup companies are now offering ransomware recovery guarantees shows that ransomware protection is now table stakes for companies, said Brent Ellis, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
And it’s not just backup providers.While storage vendors have stopped offering guarantees (at least for now), they’ve started adding Ransomware Detection into their storage systems. Additionally, they have built in workflows using storage snapshots to recover from ransomware before it reaches the backup phase. For example, Dell announced in May that it will build a workflow that uses snapshots. Other vendors, including Pure Storage, IBM, and TrueNAS SCALE, have also addressed the ransomware problem in major ways.
In all of these cases, these additions can drastically reduce response times for large-scale encrypted incidents. “This is important because it means that specific malware has less time to propagate in the network, and it limits the blast radius,” Ellis said.
Local vs. Local in the Cloud
Dual trends increasing cloud adoption and economic austerity Leading to another storage shift in 2022: a reassessment of what really belongs in the cloud and what doesn’t.
Dan Kogan, vice president of Pure Storage, said it’s really about costs versus benefits.
“It turns out that long-term leases are more expensive than buying, and companies are realizing they may be keeping more stuff locally than they initially thought,” Kogan said.
For workloads already in the cloud, Kogan wants companies to focus more on reducing costs rather than relocating those workloads back to on-premises storage.
container adopts
Container adoption is nothing new in 2022, but it has definitely grown significantly.
Organizations today use containers for many purposes, from DevOps to run microservices, software process, or large application. The problem, Kogan explained, is that backing up a container is not the same as backing up a virtual machine. He expects storage and backup products built for containers to outperform other offerings. That’s why companies like Pure Storage and Veeam are investing heavily in smaller startups that specialize in backup and storage for containers, he said.
In fact, many storage vendors have added support for containers so organizations can run container workloads directly on the storage system.Additionally, storage and backup vendors are increasing their support for Kubernetes workloads Enables companies to backup and restore individual applications in Kubernetes clusters.
“Previously, there were some backup vendors that backed up Kubernetes natively and did a good job, but this year, almost every other vendor has added some kind of native container backup capability on the storage side,” Ellis said. “This year container support was an important feature for storage and backup, last year it was a differentiating feature.”
Ellis said he expects the field to develop further in 2023, especially for some types of storage that are not commonly used with containers, such as block storage.
Further reading on storage and backup in 2022