SECURITY AND DATA SOVEREIGNTY IN A MULTICLOUD WORLD
December 2021: another year gone by in a life dominated by Covid-19. We have all become accustomed to a hybrid way of working, and every company has found its own way to navigate this. Practically speaking, everything works, but new challenges are emerging. Because so much more work is being done remotely, IT and user data are being opened up more and more just to make them accessible to employees. Furthermore, we have become more dependent on that IT than ever before. In this blog, I look at the consequences of these developments and look ahead to the Cloud trends of 2022.
THE IMPORTANCE OF CLOUD SECURITY IN 2022
In 2022, a number of themes will recur repeatedly. These are all linked to the theme of security. I expect that a number of major vulnerabilities will be discovered—much like the recently emerged Log4j/Log4s vulnerability—and that these will have a massive impact on the use of IT from the Cloud. Managed Service Providers will have their hands full patching and mitigating the impact of these types of vulnerabilities and associated attacks.
These types of incidents are a major stimulus for continuity-related themes. What about backups and a disaster recovery scenario? And how do we ensure that a company can keep working in the event of a successful hack? But besides being able to keep working, we must also look at the front end: what is a company's defense? What resilience measures are available? In short, data security will receive much more focus in corporate IT departments.
Our customers, partners, and we ourselves are focusing a great deal of attention on all layers of IT service delivery to increase resilience. In addition to firewalls, virus scanners, and backups, services such as vulnerability scans on both production and backup data will play a much more prominent role in the conversation about IT.
SOFTWARE AS A SERVICE
Then there is the role of the Cloud itself. Many companies have switched to a Software as a Service model from a public Cloud, with Microsoft and its Microsoft365 proposition being the most widely used example. This trend will also continue: more and more services and applications used within organizations are being consumed in an easy-to-use way (read: from a public Cloud).
At Fundaments, we see that our Independent Software Vendors also want to develop more rapidly in that Software as a Service world. They want to achieve this by developing applications and breaking them down into microservices. This scalable way of working requires development in the hosting platform: Kubernetes is a frequently heard answer to that. We are therefore on the verge of implementing a new platform in which all Fundaments components, in addition to hosting mission-critical applications, are also embedded. And that is completely scalable, hosted in the Netherlands, and fully managed and supported with 24/7 service.
Regarding the convenience of Software as a Service from the public Cloud, I often hear the assumption that it is always secure. There will be a shift in awareness here as well: is there actually a backup of that data, e.g., of my Microsoft365 applications? And what data am I actually storing in a public Cloud? In that light, we are going to hear more about data sovereignty. Data classification linked to how it is handled is developing into guidelines that are being applied even more strictly by organizations and governments. This leads to a nice balance between the hyperscalers (Azure, Google, and AWS) and parties that offer a private Cloud, such as Fundaments. Companies are increasingly opting for a hybrid Cloud and adding nuance to a "Cloud-first" strategy: because which Cloud is actually being referred to?
DATA IS THE NEW GOLD
All the trends and measures mentioned above ultimately revolve around one thing: data and protecting it with measures regarding availability and access. It is good to realize that data is our new gold and that this data can make or break an organization in 2022. With this realization, Fundaments will continue to focus in 2022 on further improving processes and adding even more services and tools to protect that data in every possible way and keep it manageable.
I wish you a very healthy and safe 2022!
