70 I NT E R V I EW Bumpers in the bowling alley John Peluso shares how AvePoint is helping customers to proactively and retroactively deal with the business resiliency and data management challenges created by the move to hybrid working Following the events of the past few years, building business resiliency is now top of mind for many organisations around the world. According to John Peluso, chief product officer at AvePoint, a layered approach to security is an important way for businesses to achieve this goal. “The most direct thing that we have seen customers find value in – especially in the case of a malware event like ransomware – is the ability to access data,” he says. “The way to achieve this is by having a reliable business continuity strategy. “This becomes more difficult when you consider the data that is stored on someone else’s architecture – such as server content, cloud services, or anything with a synchronisation capability – is less covered by traditional enterprise data protection strategies. That’s new territory. While many businesses may think that because they have outsourced the architecture, they've also outsourced the responsibility, in some cases they haven’t. Businesses are becoming increasingly reliant on cloud services, so they need to be factored into the overall business continuity and resilience strategy.” This reliance on cloud services has, in some ways, been driven by the swift move to hybrid and remote working. And the threats are real; 37 per cent of organisations around the world reported that they were hit by a ransomware attack in 2021, according to IDC’s 2021 Ransomware Study: Where You Are Matters! “The Covid-19 pandemic forced businesses to provide users with access to content that was outside the traditional perimeter and, as a result, could not be protected by more traditional approaches,” says Peluso. “We've had to find new ways of ensuring the protection of our data and the continuity of access to that data.” AvePoint is actively helping its customers to extend their security perimeter beyond the traditional office environment and into the remote workplace. According to Peluso, a successful approach requires a combination of things. “The smaller the overall corpus of data, the smaller a business’s footprint and the more it can focus its protection efforts. It is also important to know where that business-critical data is so it can be treated – and protected – accordingly. In the case of resiliency, you need to know where your highest value content is.” But how do organisations identify if something is business-critical? “Privacy-related or payment data can be easy to find,” says Peluso. “The data is binary – either it is a credit card number, or it is not, and there are rules you can use to automatically assess that. It’s a lot harder when it comes to business-critical data. It is information that means something to a business, but there’s no easy way to flag and identify it.” BY E L LY YAT E S - ROB E R T S “ Many organisations are now dealing with how to retrofit information management onto a system that is live in the wild”
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