Authored by: Justin Loh, Country Director, Singapore, Veritas Technologies LLC

The global pandemic has accelerated digital transformation. As new work environments are being created and an increasing number of employees work from home, companies are racing to build and strengthen their IT infrastructure. However, with more information being stored in disparate locations, it also creates challenges such as dark data and the increased cybersecurity threats such as phishing and ransomware.

In fact, the recent survey conducted by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) served as a timely reminder that more needs to be done in safeguarding mission-critical business data.  Employees continue to fall prey to fraudulent phishing emails – bank phishing scams were responsible for 374 victims losing at least $1.6 million in total.

Fanning the flames of uncertainty, organisations also face an explosion of complexity. We’re looking at highly disparate environments with services and applications that live both on-premises and in multiple public or private clouds, to supporting a mix of legacy applications and new workloads. Protecting this distributed, heterogeneous ecosystem can be extremely challenging – as business continue to struggle with simplifying operational tasks, innovating in the cloud, and reducing security risks.

Addressing these challenges, Veritas recently announced our Enterprise Data Service Platform (EDSP), designed to help businesses address these challenges by offering an integrated and unified approach to data availability, protection and insights. At the heart of EDSP, NetBackup 8.3 expands on Veritas’ unified data protection and recovery solution by helping our customers standardise across their environment, greatly reducing complexity and risk regardless of workload or cloud. Highlights include:

• Continuous data protection by maximising the amount of data that can be recovered by reducing Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) for virtual machines to near zero. This way, businesses can recover from disaster, corruption, ransomware or other malware events almost to the exact point where things went wrong.

• Improved operational resiliency and agility by transforming operating strategy from disaster recovery (DR) to automated business resilience.

• Strengthened ransomware resiliency by safeguarding data integrity with system hardening and immutability and improving recovery efficiency with automated and orchestrated rehearsals to ensure 24/7 availability of business-critical applications.

The COVID-19 induced work-from-home era is likely here to stay even in the post-pandemic world. As this work norm continues to expand organisations’ data footprint and the threat attack surface, businesses must take a proactive approach to data protection and management – now more than ever. Veritas is committed to empowering our customers with the tools and resources to be resilient against any threats that may come their way and protect their data wherever it lives – from edge, to core, to cloud.