Data protection forgotten in cloud and AI expansion Enterprise disaster recovery strategies, traditionally designed for on-premises IT infrastructures, are lagging behind the surge in cloud application usage and the integration of AI technologies, warns Keepit. Its caution follows a survey of IT decision-makers published by Foundry, highlighting patchy data protection strategies in companies with 1,000+ employees, and its own study, The great balancing act: Cybersecurity leaders tackle rising pressures, based on interviews with CISOs and CIOs. While 70% of respondents surveyed by Foundry report that their financial applications are covered by data protection strategies, only 50% say the same of their E-commerce and HR management systems. Under half say it about their CRM systems (48%) and ERP systems (42%). The report, Can data protection keep pace with the shifting landscape?, reveals that only between one third and one quarter of other systems are properly covered, including critical transaction-based systems, custom applications and collaboration and productivity tools. Moreover, only half of organisations have incorporated cloudstored SaaS data into their disaster recovery plans – although an additional 40% are planning to address this gap soon. A participant in a recent Keepit CISO roundtable said: "We solved many of these challenges 10 to 15 years ago, but with the move to cloud, it's like we're starting from scratch again." Compliance is a top concern for 73% of survey respondents, with data governance (53%) and enterprise backup and recovery (45%) also ranking highly at a time of greater regulatory scrutiny and increased cybersecurity risk. Keepit CISO Kim Larsen adds that AI presents another data protection challenge: “Good data protection is essentially ‘data classification plus good recovery capabilities’. If you understand your data and can recover uncorrupted versions of it fast, you have a solid foundation to ensure business continuity, compliance and recovery. But this is easier said than done. The complexity of implementing new initiatives, such as governance over data used by large language models (LLMs) and the need to balance conflicting IT demands, pose additional challenges.” www.keepit.com 33 technologyreseller.co.uk DISASTER RECOVERY market, to add a lot of value to customers and to make margin in the world of Microsoft, where it's harder to make margin.” MSP programme Soon, Keepit will be introducing a programme for MSPs supporting a true consumption model rather than the termcontracts traditionally sold by resellers. “This model will enable an MSP to consume 10 licences today, 20 licences next month, then go back to 10 and have complete flexibility in their consumption with zero commitment – switching on and off as their customers switch on and off. We don’t have that mechanism built backend yet. We do have MSP customers who commit to a yearly term and then deploy it their customers and can co-manage it with their users, but we don’t have that consumption mechanism. That, to us, is a true MSP programme.” For now, Keepit continues to address the needs of MSPs through Connectwise, a provider of software and services to the MSP community – one of a handful of OEM agreements that Keepit has struck with other vendors. It also has relationships with Arcserve, giving customers unified data protection and recovery across onpremises and off-premises workloads, and HPE Zerto. “HPE Zerto is a really important relationship for us,” says Mumford. “We started the relationship with Zerto pre-HPE. After HPE bought Zerto, they did due diligence on us as an OEM partner for SaaS data protection and now the whole of HPE can sell our product. That’s great validation for a smaller vendor.” UK growth After opening its UK headquarters and appointing Jerry Mumford as VP for UK, I & MEA, Keepit is planning to accelerate its growth in the UK – or as Mumford says “put the pedal to the metal”. For a company that is 100% channel and doesn’t sell anything direct (with the exception of some legacy relationships in Denmark), partner recruitment will have a big role to play in Keepit’s ongoing UK growth. “We’ve hired another regional partner manager and an EMEA distribution lead and we’re now going to tier our partner network. We have really a good partnership with Phoenix and trade fairly heavily with Softcat and CDW and are looking to add a couple more partners in that Platnium tier. Then we’ll really grow a longer commercial and SMB tail within our partner networks.” With businesses of all sizes struggling to incorporate SaaS solutions into their disaster recovery strategies (see box), there is clearly plenty of scope for Keepit to continue to expand and still not spend money it hasn’t earned.
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