Secure your hybrid work domain

Wael Mustafa, Area Vice President for MESAT at Commvault, highlights the importance of cloud store adoption and management as work from home rises.

Tell us about the rise in cyberattacks in the MENA region.

The GCC is one of the most vulnerable regions in terms of malware attacks, with over 50 million cyber attacks recorded in the first half of 2020, according to reports. The rapid pace of digitisation among GCC countries has brought with it a growing exposure to risks of cyber attacks.

Further to this, the global health crisis has undoubtedly altered the risk profile and attack vectors as a number of organisations have migrated to work from home practices.

Covid-19 has contributed to the increased incidents of cyber attacks on a global scale. For example, the FBI's Cyber Division states the number of complaints about cyberattacks is as many as 4,000 a day, a 400 per cent increase from what they were seeing pre-coronavirus. Scammers are exploiting people's fear and uncertainty around the pandemic in order to increase the likelihood of victims clicking on an attachment or link delivered in a malicious email, which can cause infection of a single machine or whole network. Given this, we have seen an increase in security and ransomware protection issues, as well as new challenges around compliance, data sovereignty and information management.

How can cloud storage help neutralise the cyber-attack fears?

With data spread across different systems and platforms for today's mobile workforce, downtime caused by a cyberattack, power outage or internal threats, is one of the biggest concerns for enterprises. A thorough approach to disaster recovery is mandatory in order to ensure that data is available and accessible at all times, irrespective of where it is located.

While utilising the cloud is a necessity for every business today, multi-cloud and hybrid environments can be costly and challenging to work with, making it difficult to move, manage and use enterprise data. Enterprises must gain a single view into the current state of their cloud data across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments.

Attaining the flexibility to move data and workloads across every type of infrastructure, both on-premises and cloud, ensures that the cloud's infrastructure is optimised to deliver the greatest cost efficiency. Furthermore, using cloud-enabled applications for processes such as disaster recovery and data protection, simplifies processes once workloads have been deployed in the cloud, preventing overhead costs.

What makes Metallic Cloud Storage from Commvault different?

We recently launched Metallic Cloud Storage Service in the region at GITEX. It is a fully integrated cloud storage target for Commvault Backup and Recovery software and HyperScale X appliance.

Metallic Cloud Storage Service brings together technology from Commvault and Microsoft Azure for security and scale, with a single pane of glass management through the Commvault Command Centre. With this, customers have a simple path to cloud storage adoption and management without the learning curve. This new solution protects organisations against cyberattacks as they look to the cloud to accelerate their digital transformation efforts while minimising risk amid an increasingly hybrid workload.

How does Commvault aid digital transformation in the UAE, in general, and Department of Digital Ajman, in particular?

Digital transformation is happening at a very rapid pace, especially as organisations have adopted remote working practices. This in turn brings with it increased security and ransomware protection issues.

At Commvault, we have seen an increased appetite for investment in intelligent data management systems as organisations realise the importance of protecting and managing their data amid the current climate. We are working closely with private organisations and government entities in the UAE and wider GCC region including Dubai Police, Dubai Municipality, and most recently, the Department of Digital Ajman, to protect their data and combat cybercrime effectively.

Commvault is providing the Department of Digital Ajman with complete backup solutions including Commvault Hyperscale, Commvault Complete, as well as mail archive and end point backup. Our backup solutions and expertise will help the department achieve an agile data management strategy and achieve greater efficiencies.

Commvault's backup and recovery solutions address data management risks that exist today and that may exist tomorrow, intelligently. Our solutions offer built-in, end-to-end encryption, including at rest and in flight, as well as auto-discovery for proactive protection of newly added datasets. The solution also offers backup coverage for file systems, applications, databases, VMs, containers, cloud-native SaaS, and endpoints.

• Business and Technology Review