Why Next-Generation Data Protection Has Ascended

Forbes

22-04-2025

Eric Herzog is the Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat.
When I attend the RSA 2025 conference in San Francisco at the end of April, I will be having a series of conversations with customers, partners and people who want to be customers or partners, and the one question I will ask all of them is: 'What are you doing about next-generation data protection?'
If the answer is 'Nothing,' then they have a problem because cybercriminals will exploit this oversight. Traditional data protection is no longer enough for enterprises.
Cybercriminals have figured out that the storage infrastructure is like a beachhead for them to launch cyberattacks, such as ransomware and malware, against a company. Cybercriminals are known to dwell within the data infrastructure of an enterprise for months, waiting for the optimal opportunity to inflict the most damage.
These bad actors will take your organization's data hostage and give you a 'ransom' demand that is in the millions of dollars, if not the tens of millions of dollars. All because of the outdatedness or incompleteness of data protection capabilities and the lack of a cyber storage resilience and recovery strategy!
If cybercriminals are patient enough to wait months for their 'opportunity' to strike, then anyone responsible for their company's cybersecurity efforts can take five minutes to learn the key elements of next-generation data protection.
The scope of data protection has expanded over the past couple of years. It's no longer just about doing snapshots of data or being able to handle backup repositories. Those things are still needed, of course, but securing the data infrastructure has grown much wider with the addition of two key elements: cyber storage resilience and near-immediate cyber recovery.
These elements are core to next-generation data protection, and they are built on being cyber-focused and recovery-first. This is a revolutionary way of thinking about your enterprise storage to support applications and workloads. What's the priority? It's the endpoint.
You certainly want to use immutable snapshots for next-gen data protection so that data cannot be altered, corrupted or deleted, and you get a known clean copy of data. But you also need to get to a point of orchestration and deeper integration than what is common today.
The capabilities that are required to ascend to next-gen data protection are automated cyber protection and cyber detection. They can make the difference between:
• Option A, an enterprise paying $5 million, $10 million, $100 million (or more) to 'ransom' their data from cyber criminals.
• Option B, an enterprise ignoring cybercriminals because the organization is able to simply recover and restore its data on its own—with no ransom payment at all—because of next-generation data protection.
Automated cyber protection, or ACP, automates the taking of immutable snapshots of data as soon as a security alert from a data center-wide cybersecurity application is triggered. There is virtually no delay compared to the commonly used manual process. This is a step that helps advance your infrastructure from just being for backup to now being optimized for restore. Restoration can happen within minutes with ACP capabilities paving the way.
Cyber detection that is integrated into primary storage is the key to determining whether data is clean or compromised. The last thing you want to do is restore corrupt data. Cyber detection uses machine learning (ML) to scan huge amounts of data to check for data integrity. This is vital in today's day and age.
When you have a cyber-focused, recovery-first strategy that utilizes these next-generation data protection capabilities, you take steps to prevent your company's data from being held hostage. It gets rid of the cyber weak spots. To use a metaphor, think of it this way: Your data infrastructure is made up of the equivalent of what I like to call 'cyber steel,' which was unthinkable just a few years ago.
If construction workers are going to build a skyscraper with a steel infrastructure for longevity, they would use the appropriate tools: heavy-duty cranes, welding equipment and specialized tools for steel work. Likewise, when you're going to build or revamp your enterprise storage infrastructure to be 'steel-like' cyber resilient, you need the right tools: immutable snapshots, logical air gapping, a fenced forensic environment, a near-instantaneous recovery capability, automated cyber protection and cyber detection.
These tools enable a smart IT team to detect, contain and mitigate the impact of an attack on your data infrastructure. They make it possible to do lightning-fast recovery of data with integrity—and do it at scale.
Last but not least: The culmination of next-generation data protection is that you are able to obtain a faster return on security investment (ROSI), a standard cybersecurity industry metric, because the money you save will far outweigh the IT investment in cyber resilient storage capabilities with integrated cyber detection and the revolutionary automated cyber protection.
As an industry, we may be getting closer to needing to consider creating a new return on security and storage investment (ROSSI) metric because the financial benefits—and the ability to put a number on cyber recovery—are changing the conversations in C-suites of leading-edge enterprises.
Instead of the classic Tony Bennett song 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco,' chief information security officers (CISOs) and cybersecurity decision-makers in attendance at the largest meeting of security experts in the world may be singing 'I Left My Traditional Data Protection in San Francisco.' After the conversations that will invariably take place across the community at the RSA conference in San Francisco, data protection cannot be viewed the same.
With a cyber-focused, recovery-first strategy that delivers end-to-end cyber storage resilience, the best is yet to come for enterprises to safeguard their data and mitigate the effects of a cyberattack—powered by next-generation data protection.
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