Kate Mollett, Senior Regional Director at Commvault, Africa South & East.

Since data is acknowledged to be the ‘new oil’ in commerce, businesses need to move quickly to tap into the resource. Having the right technology in place is a good start. Data protection experts say in order to really monetise this hot commodity, you need a reliable platform that is designed to serve as an interactive, all-encompassing dashboard to manage every aspect of data control, including security, transformation and analytics.

Secure and effective data management in today’s economy is no joke. Along with the need for vigilance within an ever-increasing cyber security threat landscape (prickled with multiple touch points linking the corporate network with the outside world), businesses also have to be compliant with PoPIA and GDPR.

Moreover, they have to keep pace with digital transformation.

Data is at the epicentre of it all. The battle to control and protect data is being waged on several fronts, and there is no doubt that businesses need help to manage their environments, irrespective of whether they are legacy, virtualised, hybrid and/or feature a multitude of different workloads etc.

It’s why data protection service providers are consolidating and streamlining their offerings and integrating layered intelligence into solutions. They want to drive home the point that a ‘single pane of glass’ approach is the most effective way to manage data in business…. Data which is more often than not spread across the organisation, in siloes, fragmented and undefined.

This lack of cohesive control is simply too costly and far too risky for business.

It’s also why established service providers in the data protection space, like Commvault, are actively engaging partners and customers to showcase the evolution of data management services and the impact of intelligent systems.

The company’s Regional Director Kate Mollett explained that businesses often use a number of tools to back up the various silos of business - so a tool to back up their mainframe, or virtual environment and then something different for cloud.

She said that Commvault has a competitive advantage in that the business is over 26 years old, it was established in the old days of legacy and witnessed first-hand the changes in the industry. The business has used this experience to adapt and develop its offering.

Mollett said the company has never swayed from its core business of data management, but, unlike competitors, has been able to transform its service to encapsulate an essential component: achieving an instant, end-to-end view of data, and leveraging intelligent technology to add the various layers of management into its offering.

And of course, being positioned in the top right hand quadrant for Gartner for Enterprise Data Management and Backup for eleven years definitely helps.

Mollett added, “Our message to customers is that eleven years of being there is important because we’ve seen the most change in these eleven years – when you look at cloud, edge and the datacentre. But some of the heavyweights that you would expect to be there are not, and some of the more bespoke vendors aren’t there because they are doing one thing very well. And when you do one thing very well, you create these silos in businesses that become very difficult to manage.”

It is these grey areas between pockets of data management and siloes that represent gateways to data leakage and breaches, according to Commvault.

Zero Trust Principle applies

It’s not difficult to understand why Commvault has heightened R&D on security.

With increasing remote employment and the rising threats of ransomware and the overall changing work environment, the pressure on IT teams to keep up is undoubtedly high. On average, organisations are increasing their tech budgets by 48% to invest in new talent and skills to keep up with this change.

Reducing the risk of ransomware is challenging but incorporating a strategy that provides visibility across your data and the ability to recover quickly is essential to resume normal business operations.

Research cited by Commvault suggests 40% to 60% of small business owners won’t re-open after experiencing a data loss and for enterprise organisations, the average cost of downtime is more than US$11,600 per minute.

A data environment that supports zero trust principles and follows the NIST multi-layered security framework is helpful..

It is a strategy that has been designed for organisations to help better plan, manage, and reduce the impact of ransomware and cyberattacks.

Mollett said Commvault has invested heavily in data security.

She said customers don’t want to respond and recover from ransomware, they want to know before it happens.

In March this year it bought TrapX, a deception technology that based on the honeypot ideology. This is the term use to describe technology which mimics data assets in an environment in order to identify and respond to threats.

TrapX was rebranded as ThreatWise and integrated into both Commvault and Metallic.

“If you consider a breach is automated, and basically there will be an automated attack on your data estate and maybe there’s one hundred simultaneous data attacks happening, it’s not one guy trying, it’s all automated. If you consider then in your environment, you’ve created maybe 30 instances of data assets that are fake assets and one of those attacks hit it, it sends off an alarm or two, we call that honeypot deception technology.”

“What happens is that as these automated attacks are launched against a specific database – and we have mimicked assets in there, because they are curated to look like the data asset, it’s drawn to it because it looks like something of value.”

This attack is immediately isolated and customers then have the option to observe it, to see how it is constructed and even surgically remove it.

Mollett and her team anticipate busy days ahead as they chase down more opportunity opening up across Africa.