3 Storage Technology Trends We Saw in 2022
The storage and backup landscape has gone through major changes this year, some due to economics, some to cyberthreats, and some to modernization.
Three trends stood out. First, the threat of ransomware continued shape the offerings of backup and storage vendors. Second, many organizations reevaluated how they distributed workloads between cloud and on-premises storage. Finally, container adoption heated up.
Vendors Became More Serious About Ransomware
Now that 2022 is drawing to a close, it’s official: Backup and storage continue to be attractive ransomware bait for hackers. A clear sign that ransomware remains a dilemma is how vendors actively added new features to their products to thwart hackers. Vendors also began offering guarantees of ransomware recovery to customers.
Backup and recovery vendor Rubrik led the charge of ransomware recovery warranties, promising to reimburse companies up to $5 million for its Enterprise Edition and Cloud Vault products as long as customers follow the rules. Other vendors have since followed, including Druva and AvePoint.
The fact that backup companies now provide ransomware recovery warranties is a sign that ransomware protection is now table stakes for companies, said Brent Ellis, a senior analyst at Forrester Research.
And it’s not just backup vendors. While storage vendors have stopped short of offering guarantees (at least for now), they have begun adding ransomware detection into their storage systems. In addition, they have built in workflows that use storage snapshots to recover from ransomware before it gets to the backup phase. Dell, for example, announced in May that it will build in workflows that use snapshots. Other vendors, including Pure Storage, IBM, and TrueNAS SCALE, have also addressed ransomware in major ways.
In all these cases, these additions can drastically reduce the response time for mass encryption events. “That’s a big deal, because it means there is less time for a particular piece of malware to propagate across the network, and it…
