Government Agencies Face Hurdles in Leveraging and Protecting their Data in a Multi-Cloud WorldThe explosive growth and distribution of data, combined with the threats posed by ransomware and other cyberattacks, makes core functions including data backup, recovery, and migration more critical than ever.

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The full effects of the ongoing digital transformation movement are tough to predict, but one outcome is certain: the amount of digital data being generated will continue to grow at a breakneck pace. Digital devices, ranging from smartphones to Internet-of-Things devices, already number in the billions, and thousands of once-manual business processes are rapidly being automated.

The result: digital data truly has become the fuel that powers – and differentiates – all modern organizations.

Extracting value from this mushrooming data resource has become a pressing priority for businesses, educational institutions, and government agencies. To identify trends and other meaningful patterns hidden within the data ocean, organizations of all types are investing in big-data analytics products and services along with cutting-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence.

However, before they can even begin to capitalize on digital data’s boundless potential, organizations must first address several fundamental data management requirements. Beyond the initial collection, cleansing, and storage of data, those requirements involve ensuring that data is always available, that it is secure, and that it can be moved easily as needed across both on-premises and cloud-based environments.

Organizations that fail to address these basic needs can’t hope to fully capitalize on digital data’s full potential. But to meet these core requirements, organizations must overcome a number of tough challenges associated with two pervasive trends:

• Data proliferation and distribution, especially across multiple cloud environments

• Cyber attacks, including ransomware, that target digital data

State and local government agencies are among those attempting to navigate through the fast-changing data landscape. These agencies share many of the same data management challenges as their commercial and educational peers, of course, but often have additional hurdles to clear.

For example, government agencies provide many essential services to their constituents, but often must do so with limited and inflexible IT budgets. Furthermore, these agencies often hold extremely sensitive and valuable data ranging from social security numbers to tax records. These characteristics can make the agencies especially attractive targets for data thieves and service disruptors.

As a result, like all modern organizations, government agencies need comprehensive data management solutions. These solutions must not only be functional and reliable, but also affordable, flexible, and easy to manage and automate. They must also be able to deal with everything from massive amounts of widely distributed data to ransomware and other cyber attacks.

Before organizations can capitalize on digital data’s potential they must address fundamental data management requirements, such as ensuring data is always available, that it is secure, and that it can be moved easily as needed across both on-premises and cloud-based environments.

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Trend 1Data Proliferation and DistributionThe massive growth of digital data – and its critical importance to all modern business, education, and government operations – is the root cause of many of today’s data management challenges.

Consider that during 2018 alone, storage suppliers added more than 700 exabytes of storage capacity to the worldwide installed base, according to IDC’s Global StorageSphere report. From 2018 to 2023, IDC estimates, storage capacity worldwide will more than double, growing in 2023 to total 11.7 zettabytes – with each zettabyte equaling approximately 1 billion terabytes of data.

Even relatively small government agencies often have many terabytes of data to manage. Those volumes can make data backups and other once-straightforward tasks extremely challenging and time-intensive. That, in turn, can mean data may sometimes be either unavailable or not fully protected.

Occurring alongside the explosion in data volumes is the wide distribution of data across on-premises, hybrid, and cloud environments. Organizations have many incentives to place computing workloads as well as data in multiple cloud environments, with business continuity and disaster recovery being just two of the main drivers. Other reasons to distribute application workloads and data include everything from the data residency requirements imposed by various countries to the economies of scale that cloud providers can offer.

Government agencies are among those organizations for which cloud computing has become a mainstream practice. In some instances, the agencies may tap the computing infrastructure and services offered by major public cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services. Also increasingly popular are cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings, which range from vertical niche applications to general business applications and suites such as Microsoft Office 365.

For all the benefits cloud-based solutions offer, spreading subsets or full copies of data across multiple locations and systems greatly increases data management complexities. Organizations must ensure that their data is both available and secure no matter its location, as well as uniformly up-to-date and consistent. They must also be able to move data among different locations easily in response to application or regulatory demands, backup and recovery needs, or for other operational and security reasons.

Regardless of the cloud model and services adopted, cloud customers need to understand that they share responsibility with their cloud providers when it comes to protecting data and implementing other best practices. Even if a SaaS provider offers a data backup and recovery capability, for example, each customer must ensure that the capability meets all of its service-level and compliance requirements and, if not, must layer on additional functionality.

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Trend 2Securing Data in an Age of RansomwareJust as digital data has become an indispensable resource for today’s organizations, it has also become an irresistible target for cyber thieves and hackers. A week rarely passes without news of some new cyber breach or assault, be it the exposure of millions of credit card numbers or a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that overwhelms a website with incoming traffic and knocks it offline.

In recent years, ransomware has become one of the most damaging and feared forms of cyber attacks. Perpetrators of these assaults use various means to gain access to an organization’s critical data, encrypt it, and demand the payment of cryptocurrency ransoms to obtain the data decryption keys.

If state and local government agencies once thought they would be unlikely targets for ransomware exploits, they’ve learned differently in recent years. Consider:

• On May 7, 2019, Baltimore suffered a ransomware attack that took many of its systems offline, although most essential services remained operational. The attackers demanded payment of 13 bitcoins—whose value was estimated in the $75,000-$100,000 range—which the city refused to pay. Two months later, the city was still working to bring some of its operations back online.

• In July 2019, La Porte County, Indiana paid a ransom of $130,000, of which $100,000 was covered by insurance. This sequence raises a pressing economic question for government agencies: Is it less expensive to purchase ransomware insurance policies or to implement data backup and recovery solutions that can allow them to quickly recover after an attack?

• Soon after two small Florida communities fell victim to ransomware attacks, more than 1,400 U.S. mayors—all those representing cities of 30,000 or more people—signed a resolution to not pay ransom to cyber attackers. Again, this stance raises the question of how these mayors will ensure that their systems are properly protected.

There are many security solutions on the market designed to counter ransomware attacks before they occur, but none can guarantee 100% protection. Should an attack occur, it was once assumed that having backup copies of critical data would allow victims to quickly recover, but ransomware attackers have sometimes tracked down and encrypted backed-up data. The only certain way to ensure backed up data remains uncorrupted and recoverable is to have an “air gap”—either physical or logical—between operational and backed-up data. It is also vital that any backup methodology offer quick and painless restoration so that services are restored promptly.

Ransomware has become one of the most damaging and feared forms of cyber attacks.

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For more information about these and other offerings within the Veeam data manage-ment portfolio, go to veeam.com.

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Veeam Addresses Today’s Data Management ChallengesFounded in 2006, Veeam has focused on delivering backup, restore, data migration, and other essential data management functions. The company’s success in its mission is reflected in its worldwide customer base, which numbers more than 350,000 organizations and is expanding at an average of 4,000 new customers each month.

Veeam’s comprehensive solution, the Veeam Availability Platform, provides data protection for any type of environment – physical, virtual, hybrid, or cloud-based. It also provides full visibility and analytics across all these environments, as well as the ability to easily migrate data as needed and ensure its consistent availability.

Veeam offers capabilities for managing data residing in popular public cloud environments including Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. Its portfolio also includes Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, which provides backup and recovery for Office 365: Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, and OneDrive for Business, including data posted in and shared with Microsoft Teams.

Among Veeam’s many data protection capabilities is Veeam Cloud Connect, an offering available from more than 22,000 cloud service providers. The service makes it easy for organizations to back up data to the cloud and provides protection against ransomware attacks. When searching for backed up data to encrypt, ransomware typically searches for Windows shares to find the backups. Because Veeam Cloud Connect does not use this type of communications, the data it sends to the cloud is hidden from ransomware even though it remains online. In addition, Veeam Cloud Connect offers the ability for full business continuity and disaster recovery by allowing organizations to replicate VMware and Hyper-V environments to the cloud provider.

Required Data Management CapabilitiesGiven the many challenges associated with data volume, distribution, and protection, government agencies and other organizations require comprehensive data management solutions. Broadly speaking, these solutions must deliver five core capabilities:

Data Loss Avoidance The most fundamental requirement of any data management solution is to provide services that ensure all critical data can be backed up at the volumes and speeds required, without suffering any data losses.

High-Speed RecoverySimply being able to recover data following a natural disaster, ransomware attack, or some other disruption is only part of what’s required. Recovering it at a speed needed to ensure uninterrupted operational continuity is also critical.

Verified RecoverabilityBackup and recovery utilities should be able to provide organizations with certainty that all of their files, applications, and servers have been fully restored.

Leveraged Data Ideally, data manage-ment solutions will allow organizations to create exact replicas of their production environments in which they can test planned changes before actually deploying them.

Complete Visibility Organizations require visibility and continuous monitoring across all of their physical, virtual, and cloud-based work- loads so they can immediately identify emerging issues and proactively address them.

Beyond these fundamental requirements, data management solutions must deliver a variety of other functions and capabilities. Those capabilities certainly should include mechanisms able to counter the threat posed by ransomware. Another core need: solutions should work seamlessly with data whether it’s based on-premises or in cloud-based SaaS offerings such as the widely-used Microsoft Office 365.

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