In today’s connected world, everyone relies on technology more than ever before. Cybercriminals have expanded their pace by entering into a computer every 40 seconds on average. And so cybersecurity has become the foremost priority of every organization as they are often the target of such attacks. Cybersecurity is the practice of defending internet-connected systems, networks, devices including hardware, software and data from attack, damage or unauthorized access. CyberSecurity is the new buzz in organizations and businesses whether large or small. Every business has different perspectives & priorities, and as cyber-attacks continue to get bigger every year it becomes important for every business to stay on top of the current trends in the cybersecurity news cycle. As breaches are not easily detected, protecting organizations from cyber threats will become difficult. Following are some of the cybersecurity trends that will be seen in 2020:

Cyber Security budget will persistently increase: CyberSecurity is the top priority of every organization professional’s mind. Companies’ annual investment in privacy and security has gone up and is estimated to increase further. Per employee, companies are spending an average of around $2,300 for cybersecurity. However, depending on the known and unknown threats, businesses progressively add resources into security solutions resulting in an increase in spending. Cyber budgets in 2019 have increased by 59%, which is around $124 billion. It is predicted to reach $128 billion by 2020. The biggest individual market with the largest spending is anticipated to be the US. 

Attackers and Defenders will cash in on Artificial Intelligence: Artificial Intelligence(AI) and Machine Learning(ML) are taking the spotlight to identify and counter back to threats that crop up. AI-based solutions are implemented to work around the clock and have the potential to respond within milliseconds to attacks as compared to when identified manually. The brilliant side of the story is defenders can use AI to build strong security frameworks to automatically detect a threat and nullify threats before they harm the organization’s security. Simulated attacks can be performed on a network to block system weaknesses before malicious attacks. But AI isn’t perfect and has a flip side too. AI-based solutions can be used by cybercriminals to probe networks. Once an AI system is assaulted, cybercriminals can use AI to intensify their offensive activity. AI could also be used for phishing and launch other attacks via AI botnets designing realistic emails to dope individuals, hence making it difficult to identify major attacks. Over time, organizations will have to mop up the cybersecurity challenges that AI holds in the future.

5g Security Predictions: 5g connectivity comes with the use of a large number of IoT devices and BYOD (Bring your own devices). The network will move to distributed routing instead of centralized routing. This means it will become hard to screen all IoT devices, connecting to the 5g network and moving away from the central router makes them the prime targets for cyber attacks. 5g experts predict that more than 36 billion devices will be connected to the internet by the end of 2020. The ever-growing volume of personal data needs to protect against exploitation as 5g will collect small details about users mobiles, cars and other sensitive data that will give cybercriminals more opportunities for exploitation and attacks. The dramatic expansion of 5g creates a multidimensional cyberattack vulnerability.In the increase of emerging threats, redefined security solutions or framework is the need of an hour.

Expertise Adversity: The shortage of Cybersecurity professionals will continue to increase. The Cybersecurity training needs to be advanced as certifications alone won’t help. It has been a recurring issue for the last couple of years. The number of cybersecurity openings is flowing all over the place rapidly, but the supply can’t keep up the demands. This gap is expected to be widened by 2020. Cybersecurity Ventures recently estimated that the global shortage of cybersecurity will reach 3.5 million unfilled positions by 2021.

Cybersecurity’s future is in the clouds: Utilization of cloud has become inescapable, users store photos and memories, email accounts, business files, and other important personal data. With on-premise data spread across on public and private clouds, organizations do not have centralized control leaving several security gaps. To bridge these gaps organizations are constantly working on implementing hybrid environment solutions for cloud deployments for both public and private clouds. 

Data Isolation and Guidelines will intensify: Organizations need to restructure their data privacy rules and regulations as the previous year it was predicted by the European Union(EU) will penalize violation of General Data Protection Regulations(GDPR). EU created GDPR for security protection of data for companies doing business with European customers. High-profile data breach attacks made consumers more and more demanding for better privacy rules. Government all around the world is so involved in the global cybersecurity crisis that they keep updating new data storage regulations. A huge amount of private data stored over the internet calls for robust security measures and practices affecting the organization’s massive security operation in 2020. The Indian government will reveal the official cybersecurity policy by January 2020.

The number of data breaches & attacks is increasing by the day. Cybercriminals are also getting advanced by using the double-sided sword of AI to break into organization cybersecurity. It becomes important to keep updated with the latest technologies. Merging the latest and existing technologies will help protect businesses of all sizes against upcoming threats.

So what do you think, is your organization Cyber Aware? 

Attacks can come from any loose end, so Beware of the Trap.

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Are you looking for intelligent, automated and simplified management of data?

Know how you can achieve that by Hyper-converged Infrastructure.

What does Hyper-converged Infrastructure mean?

Hyper-converged infrastructure is a prototype shift that tightly integrates storage, computes, networking and virtualization resources in a single system. Thus, reducing infrastructure complexity and enhancing scalability without compromising on performance. Hyper-converged infrastructure can also be termed as Hyper-convergence.

There are many benefits of this tightly integrated node infrastructure, but the primary reasons for organizations switching from complex infrastructure to the simplicity of hyper-convergence are lower costs, consistent performance, and flexibility. Things that Hyper-convergence can do:

Cost-Efficient 

Data scaling is the biggest challenge that organizations are facing today. Hyper-convergence is modeled to avoid frequent purchases of infrastructure every few years. Low costs hardware is used to scale the data center that can be easily managed. Expanding HCI is as simple as just adding the IT resource. Integrating components reduces storage use, power use and lowers management costs. HCI data center costs become less as there is lesser equipment to purchase and manage. Companies can start small and grow resources as needed.

Staff Efficient

As everything gets folded into a hyper-converged environment, recruitment needs of the organization change. Instead of having specialist staff for each resource area, infrastructure specialist can be recruited.

Data-Efficient

Because all the components are working together, the management of tools can be achieved from one console. There’s constant pressure on the IT department and data centers to deliver predictable results. When multiple applications share the same infrastructure, it’s possible that the performance of one application can hinder the performance of others. HCI’s performance settings eliminate resource contention and variable application performance. It also improves data efficiency by deduplicating data which leads to an increase in storage capacity and network bandwidth.

Data Protection

In a traditional data center, data protection is both complex and expensive. It is required to purchase expensive hardware to protect data. However Hyper-converged environment comes with built-in functionalities like data backup, recovery, and disaster recovery. After all hyper-convergence is all about simplifying infrastructure.

Performance Efficient

Hyper-convergence allows organizations to deploy workloads and many kinds of applications to enjoy high performance. HCI uses fast CPUs and SSDs storage devices. The environment handles all CPU and memory capacity so that instead of focusing on individual resource needs administrators can focus on applications.

Multi-cloud Support Efficient

Hyper-convergence simplifies a hybrid cloud environment and lessens transitioning time and cost. Data & Applications can be moved easily between servers and the public cloud.

Data grows by 40% every year, in 2019 it has reached 28,000 exabytes.

With data growing at that speed, organizations need additional challenges to keep up with the infrastructure updates. With the Hybrid cloud being used endlessly,3-tier infrastructure cannot fulfill all the IT needs. Hyper-converged infrastructure is designed to deliver simplicity, higher automation, and scalability than converged infrastructure. Investments in the Hyper-converged environment has increased in recent years. Hyper-convergence is a good choice for those organizations that uses virtualization largely and having difficulty to cope up with the cost that is required for data storage and protection. With the technology in the right place, organizations will no longer need to rely on different computer or storage systems. They can rather invest their time and human resources on operational aspects than on maintaining infrastructure. 

Hyper-converged infrastructure is a bundled software model with potentials like data compression, data protection, data optimization, data deduplication, backup, and recovery. It is an integrated hardware and software package implemented and sold by a single vendor. Thus it requires less installation and configuration.

As per Gartner, 20% of organizations that are currently using 3-tier infrastructure will transit to hyper-converged infrastructure by 2020.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is the future. It centralized all the hardware needs in a single console. It is flexible and uses a pay-as-you-grow model when organizations need to expand.

Given the above-mentioned benefits of hyper-convergence, are you ready for this evolution? Have you already moved to the hyper-converged data centers, share your thoughts on this IT infrastructure solution!

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Technology today has changed the elementary facet of our lives. With urge for a stronger and better internet connectivity, digitization of processes has led the world to move towards automation. That wasn’t enough and thus the new buzz word Hyper Automation.

Hyper automation is the advancement of traditional automation capabilities by using technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Machine Learning (MI) to automate processes. Basically, hyper automation is a combination of automation tools to increase AI decision making. Hyper automation is the future of RPA of replacing human actions required for digital tasks. Gartner says that multiple tools are needed to replace the work that a human can do, and thus hyper automation combines all the automation efforts under a single umbrella.

Hyper automation is a prodigious tool to uplift the business. Businesses can benefit immensely from hyper automation in following ways:

• Decrease human effort by doing lot of work in less time
• Reduces risk of human errors
• Increases productivity and output

Execution and implementation of automation is tough and complicated. It creates new challenges for the businesses with how the IT environment is controlled. Automation is present in every step taken in companies such as device connectivity, collecting data, extract valuable data from business for analytics and present it to stakeholders for business profits. Automation is an underlying layer and thus judgment calls to identify the scope of automation are required before implementation. Thus, Gartner defines hyper automation important when constructing IoT devices.

Hyper automation will continue to expand, and companies need to focus on automating complex processes resulting in end-to-end solution. Amazon and FedEx are the top companies that has used hyper automation to intensify customers experience and execute piece of work related to logistics.

The implementation of automation results in a digital twin of an organization (DTO). Digital twin is a concept about creating digital representation of connected IoT devices managed by a single tool. Hence instead of giving access to different IoT devices, digital twin can be presented to stakeholders. Digital twin helps in predictive analysis of organizations assets leading to efficient functioning of business. With this concept businesses can eliminate problems before they occur to prevent failures. DTO are designed to work consistently and continuously. The data collected in this process is analyzed continuously and saved in cloud. This results in accessing data instantly for various business analysis. It also enables users to resolve issues from any remote location.

We’ve previously discussed how RPA will be effective for the productivity of the business. Soon automation will be important for every company. But without being aware of where automation is required in business and following the trend, implementing it would be a disaster. Hyper automation is both a blessing and a curse. So, it becomes important to firstly identify areas for automation. Employees in company should also be trained to make most out of automation and not think it as a danger to their job.

Companies are competing to future proof their business by implementing intelligent, robotic and automation systems. For hyper-automation in every facet of business it requires continuous and optimal blending of human and machine capabilities.

In a short span of time expansion of hyper-automation has inspired companies to eradicate manual operations quickly to use human force in other more important areas of business. If you’re still not in the game, then you’re definitely missing out on opportunities of expanding your business.

So, is your business ready for hyper automation? If not, what other automation technologies are you currently engaging? What benefits have your business reaped?

Please write to us at marketing@goapl.com

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