Business
Five Enterprise Storage Trends for 2023: Vendors must rise to the challenge

Author: Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat
Looking ahead, 2023 will be a very exciting year for enterprise storage, here are 5 trends we see emerging. In each case vendors will need to respond quickly with the right solutions, but do they have the right foundations in place to do so?
#1: Convergence of cybersecurity and storage as a cornerstone of an enterprise IT strategy
CIOs and CISOs continue to increasingly realise that, if they don’t combine storage with cybersecurity, they’re leaving a gap in their corporate cybersecurity strategy. IT leaders are accustomed to protecting the network and endpoints, deploying firewalls and looking at the application layer. However, all of their data ends up on storage. The great awakening in the enterprise market, heading into the new year, is that, if an enterprise storage solution does not have the capabilities to help combat a cyberattack, the C-suite and the IT team are leaving the organisation severely exposed. The trend emerging is for storage that is buoyed by cyber resilience to be part of the overall comprehensive cybersecurity strategy in every large organisation.
This means vendors must – if they don’t already – offer storage solutions that perfectly align with cybersecurity solutions and strategies commonly used to protect enterprises, as well as cloud hosting providers, managed hosting providers and managed service providers. It will require a vendor and its partners to work closely with CIOs and CISOs, along with other IT leaders and administrators, to make cyber resilient storage a key part of a comprehensive cybersecurity strategy, plugging vulnerable gaps and securing the data against cyberattacks.
#2: Boosting the ability to make a near-instantaneous recovery from a cyberattack with the highest level of trust in the data
The question is not “if” your organisation is going to be hit with a cyberattack; it’s a question of “when” and “how often.” Your organisation will get attacked, and it could get attacked multiple times. At that point, it’s a matter of how you respond to that attack. Cyber resilience is among the most important and highly demanded requirements of enterprises today to combat cyberattacks across the entire storage estate and data infrastructure.
Even if your endpoint or your network security keeps the cyber criminals out once or twice, there will surely be times when they get through. When that happens, one of the critical things for an IT team is to get a known good copy of the data and make a speedy recovery. It’s crucial to use an immutable snapshot of the data to ensure that the data has not been compromised. In other words, the data can be trusted. Finding a known good copy is done by curating the potential candidates to restore in a fenced forensic environment. The last thing you want to do is just start restoring data that has malware or ransomware infiltrated within it.
Vendors will need to offer solutions that combine immutable snapshots of data, a fenced forensic environment, logical air gapping, and virtually instantaneous data recovery – ideally with a rock-solid cyber storage guaranteed SLA. Once a cybercriminal gets through an enterprise’s line of defense, it’s all about resilience and recoverability of the data, building on a known good copy of the data. A cyber resilient storage infrastructure helps you more easily identify threats with automation and put data into a safe, fenced forensic environment. The cyberattack is nullified.
#3: Harnessing the capability of anomalous pattern detection to do cyber scanning on secondary storage
We’re seeing a trend emerging more broadly in 2023 around cyber scanning with the ability to do anomalous pattern detection, particularly on secondary storage. In the longer term, we see an expansion onto primary storage over the next 2-3 years. This cyber scanning is another tool in the storage admin’s tool bag, along with cyber resilience, to be proactively strengthening the data infrastructure to handle the ever-increasing sophistication and deceptiveness of cyberattacks. Whether for money, power or perverse entertainment, these attacks are designed to take down your business.
Vendors will need to provide anomalous pattern detection capability, possibly through partnerships with backup vendors as part of a wider ecosystem. This is an evolving area of technology and it gives customers the ability to do scanning on secondary storage, adding further value for enterprise customers and partners.
#4: Growing demand for ease of deploying cyber storage, resilience, and advanced security technologies
Enterprises and service providers are increasingly seeking easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use solutions that meet their needs for cyber storage resilience and integrated security technologies. They want not only automation, but also the next level up with autonomous automation. End-users don’t want complex set-ups anymore. They want to be able to quickly and efficiently access forensic environments, and when it comes to recovery of data, they expect two or three clicks, and then be done with it.
Vendors will need to respond with a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ approach to cyber storage, offering advanced technology that is also easy to deploy and use.
#5: Cyber resilience is being recognized as necessary for both primary and secondary storage as a safeguard against cyberattacks and internal threats
People often think that cyber storage resilience is only about backing up data. That’s not true. Cyber storage resilience is more than backup. This is an important distinction that speaks to a trend for the next year because smart cyber criminals won’t only attack your secondary datasets, like backup, but also attack your primary datasets. In recognition of this reality, enterprises and service providers are heading into the new year injecting new levels of cyber storage resilience into both their primary and secondary storage environments. There is a shift in the enterprise market starting to happen from being reactive – waiting for the cyber criminals to attack and then doing something about it – to proactively prepare for recovery, likened to disaster recovery. Companies usually have elaborate disaster recovery plans and business continuity measures. There is a growing awareness that “cyber disaster plans” need to be put in place with the right set of capabilities to initiate and execute rapid recovery.
Vendors need to help customers rethink their approaches to cyber storage resilience, shifting approach reactive to proactive. Cyber storage resilience enables an enterprise to nullify a ransomware attack, as if the attack didn’t even happen. No ransom, no disruption and full protection against attacks.
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Business
‘Tis the Season to be Wary: How to Protect Your Business from Holiday Season Hacking

The holiday season will soon be in full swing, but cybercriminals aren’t known for their holiday spirit. While consumers have traditionally been the prime targets for cybercriminals during the holiday season – lost in a frenzy of last-minute online shopping and unrelenting ads – companies are increasingly falling victim to calculated cyber attacks.
Against this backdrop of relaxed vigilance and festive distractions, cybercriminals are set to deploy everything from ransomware to phishing scams, all designed to capitalise on the holiday haze. Businesses that fail to prioritise their cybersecurity could end up embracing not so much “tidings of comfort and joy” as unwanted data breaches and service outages well into 2024.
Threat Landscape
With the usual winter disruptions about to kick into overdrive, opportunistic hackers are aiming to exploit organisational turmoil this holiday season. Industry research consistently indicates a substantial spike in cyber attacks targeting businesses during holidays, particularly when coupled with the following factors:
- Employee Burnout: Employee burnout is rife around the holidays. Trying to complete major projects or hit targets before the end of the year can require long hours and intense workweeks. Overwrought schedules combined with the seasonal stressors of Christmas shopping, family politics, travel expenses, hosting duties etc., can lead to a less effective and exhausted workforce.
- Vacation Days: The holiday season is a popular time for employees to use up their vacation days and paid time off. This means offices are often emptier than usual during late December and early January. With fewer people working on-site, critical security tasks are neglected and gaps in security widen.
- Network Strain: The holidays also mark a period of network strain due to increased traffic and network requests. Staff shortages also reduce organisational response capacity if systems are compromised. The result is company networks that are understaffed and overwhelmed.
Seasonal Cyber Attacks
There are many ways bad actors look to exploit system vulnerabilities and human errors to breach defences this time of year. But rather than relying solely on sophisticated hacking techniques, most holiday-fueled cyber attacks succeed through tried and true threat vectors:
- Holiday-Themed Phishing and Smishing Campaigns: Emails and texts impersonating parcel carriers with tracking notifications contain fraudulent links, deploying malware or capturing account credentials once clicked by unwitting recipients trying to track deliveries. A momentary slip-up is all it takes to unleash malware payloads granting complete network access.
- Fake Charity Schemes: Malicious links masquerading as holiday philanthropy efforts compromise business accounts when donated to.
- Remote Access Exploits: External connectivity to internal networks comes with the territory of the season. However, poorly configured cloud apps and public Wi-Fi access points create openings for criminals to intercept company data from inadequately protected employee devices off-site.
- Ransomware Presents: Empty offices combined with delayed threat detection gives innovative extortion malware time to wrap itself around entire company systems and customer data before unveiling a not so jolly ransom note on Christmas morning.
Without proper precautions, the impact from misdirected clicks or downloads can quickly spiral across business servers over the holidays, leading to widespread data breaches and stolen customer credentials.
Essential Steps to Safeguard Systems
While eliminating all risks remains unlikely and tight budgets preclude launching entirely new security initiatives this holiday season, businesses can deter threats and address seasonal shortcomings through several key actions:
Prioritise Core Software Updates
Hardening network infrastructure is the first line of defence this holiday season. With many software products reaching end-of-life in December, it is critical to upgrade network architectures and prioritise core software updates to eliminate known vulnerabilities. Segmenting internal networks and proactively patching software can cut off preferred access routes for bad actors, confining potential breaches when hacking attacks surge.
Cultivate a Culture of Cybersecurity Awareness
Cybersecurity awareness training makes employees more resilient to rising social engineering campaigns and phishing links that increase during the holidays. Refreshing employees on spotting suspicious emails can thwart emerging hacking techniques. With more distractions and time out of the office this season, vigilance is more important than ever! Train your staff to “never” directly click a link from an email or text. Even if they are expecting a delivery they should still go directly to the known trusted source.
Manage Remote Access Proactively
Criminals aggressively pursue any vulnerabilities exposed during the holiday period to intercept financial and customer data while defences lie dormant. Therefore, businesses should properly configure cloud apps and remote networks before the holiday season hits. This will minimise pathways for data compromise when employees eventually disconnect devices from company systems over the holidays.
Mandate Multifactor Authentication (MFA)
Most successful attacks stem from compromised user credentials. By universally mandating MFA across all access points this season, retailers add critical layers of identity verification to secure systems. With MFA fatigue setting in over holidays, have backup verification methods ready to deter credential stuffing.
Prepare to Respond, Not Just Prevent
Despite precautions, holiday disasters can and do occur. Businesses need response plans for periods of disruption and reduced capacity. Have emergency communications prepared for customers and partners in case an attack disrupts operations. The time to prepare is before vacation schedules complicate incident response. It’s important to know how and when to bring in the right expertise if a crisis emerges.
By following best practices to prevent cybersecurity standards slipping before peak winter months, companies can enjoy the holidays without becoming victims of calculated cyber attacks. With swift and decisive action there is still time for businesses to prepare defences against holiday season hacks.
Business
Transforming unified comms to future-proof your business

By Jonathan Wright, Director of Products and Operations at GCX
Telephony is not usually the first thing SMBs think about when it comes to their digital transformation. However, push and pull factors are bringing it up the priority list and leading them to rethink their approach.
Indeed, it is just one year until PSTN (the copper-based telephone network) will be switched off by BT Openreach. With a recent survey showing that as many as 88% of UK businesses rely on PSTN, many organisations’ hands are being forced to review their communications ahead of the deadline.
But even if this change for some is being forced upon them, the benefits of building a more future-proofed unified communications strategy far outweigh the associated challenges. Nearly three-quarters of employees in UK SMEs now work partly or fully remotely, indeed the highest percentage of any G7 country. Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephone systems are much better suited to distributed workforces as the phone line is assigned on a user basis, rather than to a fixed location.
And with more companies now integrating AI capabilities to augment their products and services – like Microsoft Teams Pro which leverages OpenAI for improved transcription, automated notes generation and recommended actions – the productivity-boosting benefits for users are only improving.
Making the right choice
For those companies that are seizing the opportunity to change their unified comms in 2024, what should they consider when making their decision?
- Choose platforms that will boost user adoption – User adoption will make or break the rollout of a new IT project. So due consideration should be given to what products or services will have the path of least resistance with employees. Choosing a service or graphical user interface (GUI) users are already used to, like Zoom or MS Teams, is likely to result in a higher adoption rate than a net new service.
- Embrace innovation with AI capabilities – While some of the services leveraging AI and Large Language Model (LLM) to enhance their capabilities are more expensive than traditional VoIP, the productivity gains could offer an attractive return on investment for many small businesses. Claiming back the time spent typing up meeting notes, or improving the response time to customer calls with automatically-generated actions, will both have tangible benefits to the business. That said, companies should consider what level of service makes sense to their business; they may not need the version with all the bells and whistles to make significant efficiency gains.
- Bring multiple services under a single platform – The proliferation of IT tools is becoming an increasing challenge in many businesses; it creates silos that hamper collaboration, leaves employees feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of communications channels to manage, and leads to mounting costs on the business. Expanding the use of existing platforms, or retiring multiple solutions by bringing their features together in one new platform, benefits the business and user experience alike.
- Automate onboarding to reduce the burden on IT – Any changes to unified comms should aim to benefit all of the different stakeholders – and that includes the IT team tasked with implementing and managing it. Choosing platforms which support automated onboarding and activation, for example, will reduce the burden on IT when provisioning new tenants, as well as with the ongoing policy management. What’s more, it reduces the risk of human error when configuring the setup to improve the overall security. Or, in the case of Microsoft Teams, even negates the need for Microsoft PowerShell.
- Consider where you work – Employees are not only working between home and the office more. Since the pandemic, more people are embracing the digital nomad lifestyle, while others are embracing the opportunity to work more closely with clients on-site or at their offices. This should be considered in unified comms planning as those companies with employees working outside the UK will need to choose a geo-agnostic service.
- Stay secure – Don’t let security and data protection be an afterthought. Opt for platforms leveraging authentication protocols, strong encryption, and security measures to safeguard sensitive information and support compliance.
Making the right switch
As many small businesses start planning for changes in their telephony in 2024 as the PSTN switch-off approaches, it is important that take the time to explore how the particular requirements of their organisations and how the changes to their communications could better support their new working practices and boost productivity.
Business
Will your network let down your AI strategy?

Rob Quickenden, CTO at Cisilion
As companies start to evaluate how they can use AI effectively, there is a clear need to ensure your network is up to the challenges of AI first. AI applications are going to require your data to be easily accessible and your network will need to be able to handle the huge compute needs of these new applications. It will also need to be secure enough at all points of access for the different applications to end users’ different devices. If your network isn’t reliable, readily available and secure it is likely going to fail.
In Cisco’s 2023 Networking Report 41% of networking professional across 2,500 global companies said that providing secure access to applications distributed across multiple cloud platforms is their key challenge, followed by gaining end-to-end visibility into network performance and security (37%).
So, what can you do to make your network AI ready?
First, you need to see AI as part of your digital transformation, then you need to look at where you need it and where you don’t. Jumping on the bandwagon and implementing AI for the sake of it isn’t the way forward. You need to have a clear strategy in place about where and how you are going to use AI. Setting up an AI taskforce to look at all aspects of your AI strategy is a good first step. They need to be able to identify how AI can help transform your business processes and free up time to focus on your core business. At the same time, they need to make sure your infrastructure can handle your AI needs.
Enterprise networks and IT landscapes are growing more intricate every day. The demand for seamless connectivity has skyrocketed as businesses expand their digital footprint and hybrid working continues. The rise of cloud services, the Internet of Things (IoT), and data-intensive applications have placed immense pressure on traditional network infrastructures and AI will only increase this burden. AI requires much higher levels of compute power too. The challenge lies in ensuring consistent performance, security, and reliability across a dispersed network environment.
Use hybrid and multi-cloud to de-silo operations
According to Gartner’s predictions, by 2025, 51% of IT spending will shift to the cloud. Underscoring the importance of having a robust and adaptable network infrastructure that can seamlessly integrate with cloud services. This is even more important with AI as it needs to access data from different locations and sources across your business to be successful. For example, AI often requires data from different sources to train models and make predictions. A company that wants to develop an AI system to predict customer churn may need to access data from multiple sources such as customer demographics, purchase history and social media activity.
IT teams need to make sure that they are using hybrid cloud and multi-cloud to de-silo operations to bring together network and security controls and visibility and allow for easy access to data. Where businesses use multiple cloud providers or have some data on-premise, they need to be reviewing how that data will be used and so how to access it across departments.
Install the best security and network monitoring
It’s clear that as we develop AI for good, there is also a darker side weaponizing AI to create more sophisticated cyber-attacks. Businesses need end-to-end visibility into their network performance and security and to be able to provide secure access to applications distributed across multiple cloud platforms. This means having effective monitoring tools in place and the right layers of security – not only at the end user level but also across your network at all access points.
Being able to review and test the performance of your SaaS based applications will also be key to the success of your AI solutions. AI requires apps to work harder and faster so tasting their speed, scalability and stability, and ensuring they are up to the job and can perform well under varying workloads is important.
Secure Access Service Edge
The best way to ensure your network security is as good as it can be is to simplify your tools and create consistency by using Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). This is an architecture that delivers converged network and security as service capabilities including SD-WAN and cloud native security functions such as secure web gateways, cloud access security brokers, firewall as-a-service, and zero-trust network access. SASE delivers wide area network and security controls as a cloud computing service directly to the source of connection rather than at the data centre which will protect your network and users more effectively.
SD-WAN connectivity
If you haven’t already, extending your SD-WAN connectivity consistently across multiple clouds to automate cloud-agnostic connectivity and optimise the application experience is a must. It will enable your organisation to securely connect users, applications and data across multiple locations while providing improved performance, reliability and scalability. SD-WAN also simplifies the management of WANs by providing centralised control and visibility over the entire network.
As we head towards the new era of AI, cloud is the new data centre, Internet is the new network, and cloud offerings will dominate applications. By making sure your network is AI ready, by adopting a cloud-centric operating model, having a view of global Internet health and the performance of top SaaS applications, IT teams will be able to implement their company’s AI strategy successfully.

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