By Kate Mollett, Regional Director at Commvault Africa

The world has changed in many respects in recent years, and with this there has also been a significant change in the way we do business. It is this change that has been driving the rapid adoption of cloud technologies – a trend that was hugely accelerated by the global COVID-19 pandemic.

In response, hyperscalers have been developing proprietary technologies to allow enterprises to move more applications and workloads to the cloud. This is good news, as it comes at a time when a move to the cloud, and the adoption of cloud technologies continues to be top of mind for many CIOs. In fact, some 70% of CIOs now have a cloud-first approach and are expecting to use the cloud as part of their data centre strategy.

Additionally, the rapid shift to remote working has drastically increased the use of sales productivity tools to the extent that the adoption of sales applications is now the fastest growing cloud trend, for both enterprises and small businesses. Yet, while we have seen this robust growth of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) adoption, about 81% of customers are not running any third-party backup applications. This is alarming at a time when the swiftly changing landscape is challenging businesses like never before. 

Data stored in many locations

Firstly, modern enterprises store their data in more places now, and many of these locations may not have protection in place. This means that organisations now must safeguard remote devices such as employee laptops, as well as data at the edge, in addition to emerging SaaS applications, new productivity tools, cloud workloads and cloud environments. 

Secondly, we have also seen that criminals are significantly increasing their efforts. Statistics show that online scams increased by a staggering 400% in March 2020, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Specifically, ransomware attacks, as a trend, are going in the wrong direction and this, combined with a larger attack surface, produces more risks for businesses and their data.

Lastly, there are new imperatives for organisations to secure this data at the edge, in the data centre, and in the cloud, all in a rapidly evolving business environment. Protecting business data, no matter where it lives, is always going to be an organisation’s responsibility.

Therefore, in order to succeed in protecting these workloads, organisations need a modern approach. Ideally, this should allow them to comfortably meet their service level agreements (SLAs), and data retention requirements, while also safeguarding them from deletion and attack.

Shedding upfront costs

The modern enterprise must be able to shed its hardware, losing those large upfront costs, and the maintenance associated with data protection. Organisations need an approach that will have them back up and running within minutes of an attack, enable them to manage their environments remotely, and scale dynamically without the burden of hidden data ingress fees. In short, enterprises need a solution that keeps their organisational data compliant, while ensuring their data is always recoverable and safe.

Ideally suited to the task is Commvault’s Metallic cloud native solution, as it delivers enterprise-grade data protection, with the simplicity of SaaS. It is proven to comprehensively safeguard enterprises from data deletion, corruption, and ransomware, ensuring that their data is always recoverable, and protected against attacks.

Additionally, Metallic will ensure that organisational data is compliant by meeting an enterprise’s internal and external regulation requirements by providing intuitive tools to manage this data. With Metallic, enterprises can count on award winning data protection across their critical workloads in one simple, and scalable SaaS solution.