DENVER – On theme with the "more than ready" tagline at this week's Commvault GO event, Forrester VP and principal analyst Dave Bartoletti laid out a handful of topics that organization need to be “more than ready” for when it comes to their cloud and data management plans in 2020.

Speaking during a keynote address, Bartoletti said that the cloud and data storage are "coming down to earth," residing "in data centers and on-premises." This means that companies need to prepare for Kubernetes, cloud-native applications, recoverability — and ransomware attacks. 

Bartoletti explained that the mass migration to containerize and orchestrate applications with Kubernetes has propelled rapid application deployment and portability for DevOps teams. He predicts that the coming year will see traditional IT administrators jump aboard the Kubernetes train to run backup and recovery of their data management strategies in virtual environments with greater vision. 

Tied to that Kubernetes push, Bartoletti noted that the application ecosystem is completely changing. To operate in this new, cloud-native world of orchestrated containers and microservices, organizations will need automation.

This will come via platforms such as Kubernetes that will be the standard for IT teams to run and maintain thousands of applications across different locations, which is a feat no single human could accomplish, he added.

Not all data is equal, and this means it doesn't all need to be recovered at the same time. 

IT and business professionals need to determine what is the most business critical data, but without visibility it’s difficult to predict storage and protection needs for data sets.

Too many companies don’t know how much they can recover — or how quickly they can recover that data. In other words: they don’t have visibility into recoverability. 

2020 demands a unified readiness dashboard to inform IT and business professionals how to make better real-time decisions, and transition from making reactive actions to taking proactive measures to achieve predictability, Bartoletti said.

Ransomware attacks are up 500% in the last year with damage costs expected to soar up to $11 billion in the coming year, Bartoletti said. 

Cyberattacks are not slowing down, and he said 2020 holds no promise of  improvement. 

As attackers continue to evolve and adapt, Bartoletti predicts ransomware attacks will get nastier and more sophisticated in the new year targeting logistic and manufacturing data and attacking backups in an attempt to snuff any hope of a full recovery. 

Attackers are beginning to look into finances to determine how much a recovery will cost organizations to inflict as much pain as possible without putting companies out of business; shooting to maim, not kill.

“Your best option might be to pay the ransom,” Bartoletti said turning to address the audience, “Are you ready to be offline for a week?”