In the UAE, few organisations fully embraced hybrid working before the pandemic. Yet, it has become widely popular today.
According to recent studies by a UAE-based recruitment agency, 69 percent of companies surveyed said that they now offer remote working options, compared with only 43 percent prior to the pandemic.
To accommodate these hybrid working models there was an unpredictable uptick in the adoption of cloud applications. In fact, 77 percent of UAE companies implemented new cloud capabilities or expanded elements of their cloud infrastructure ahead of their original timelines, according to Veritas research.
However, this has proved a mixed blessing. While the move to cloud delivered the flexibility required to survive the pandemic, it also fractured data across multiple, disparate platforms, exacerbating management challenges and opening companies up to greater data vulnerability. As a result, 50 percent of the UAE organisations that had accelerated their journey to the cloud admitted to Veritas’ researchers that they now have gaps in their data-protection strategy.
Simultaneously, ransomware attacks have skyrocketed. Over the last year, Veritas’ Vulnerability Lag report indicates that UAE organisations were victim to an average of 4.2 disruption-causing ransomware attacks each. Furthermore, 99 percent of UAE respondents stated they experienced downtime to their businesses as a result.
With cloud-enabled remote working here to stay, data volumes growing exponentially, and cybercriminals eager to exploit any holes in security, how can IT teams shore up their protection infrastructures to ensure enhanced cyber resiliency?
Autonomous, AI-powered security
The first step is to recognise that this isn’t an issue that can be resolved simply by leaning into the existing IT team. Veritas research showed that the average company in the UAE would need to hire 34 new members of IT staff if they wanted to be able to close their existing security gaps within the next year.
Hackers aren’t relying on manpower alone to attack businesses. Instead, they’re introducing threats that use Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to automatically infiltrate systems and adapt to avoid detection. Companies need to harness similar AI and ML technologies to beat them at their own game.
Veritas believes that the solution is Autonomous Data Management (ADM). With ADM, companies can harness AI and ML to ensure that data protection just happens, invisibly and autonomously.
ADM solutions independently find and protect data, no matter where it lives, identifying new critical data that they need to protect and learning the correct policies to apply to it. Once these data sets have been created, ADM continuously determines where and how to store them in the most efficient and secure way possible. ADM solutions then autonomously monitor the data, scanning to detect malware threats and self-healing it to ensure that a clean version is always available.
Ultimately, ADM can help to autonomously recover this clean data in the event that it’s needed, enabling ransom-free recoveries at scale, while eliminating the human burden from data and lifecycle management.
AI and people working together
However, AI and Machine Learning can’t – and shouldn’t – do everything. The future of data protection strategies needs to be 100 percent human-centric. Autonomous solutions need to learn from the IT team, who will need to oversee decisions and ensure that best practice is followed. We see a future where the IT team leads creative problem solving and decision making, while autonomous solutions implement their ideas.
As businesses navigate through the challenges of managing hybrid workforces and securing data, we expect to see automation and AI playing a significant role in shouldering time-consuming data protection processes, enabling IT teams to power ahead with innovation activities and continue scaling their businesses – safe in the knowledge that their data is safe.
