2019 Review

As we come to the end of the decade and enter a new information decade, we reflect over the past decade and the lessons we have learnt. On how the Cryoserver Brand and solutions have matured and blossomed across the world and how we have earnt the title as Cryoserver “The Email Archiving Experts” by our customers and partners.

A Reseller Choice Award Winner is a prestigious award and honoured to be acknowledged for this achievement. 10 years ago we started to deliver our Cryoserver Email Archiving Cloud offerings in conjunction with the onpremise approach. Over recent years we have seen a shift of our onpremise Cryoserver customers migrating to our cloud service. As we stand today ~ 40% of the Cryoserver customers are now delivered by one of our Cloud platforms.

In addition and for the 4th consecutive year we were recognised as the Most Trusted Email Archiving Tool – 2019 – UK by Global 100.

Both awards would not be achieved without the continued and unwavering support of our loyal Cryoserver customers, channel partners and worldwide partners and distributors in trusting in the Cryoserver solutions. On behalf of the Cryoserver Team a huge thank you for voting for us and support of Cryoserver.

We further reflect on so many changes over the decade, new technologies and new regulations impacting all of us. One of the bigger regulatory changes was the introduction of European General Data Protection Regulatory Act (GDPR) for European businesses. GDPR, a common data privacy legislation and language across all European member states on how to protect data at rest, controlling access to the data and audit any access, which Cryoserver does with email and IM communications very well. To help Cryoserver customers comply we enhanced and introduced the Cryoserver Privileged & Delete User to comply with the Right to be Forgotten Requests. To date we have seen a handful of customers needing to remove data from their archives, using this Privileged and Delete workflow.

Looking forwards, in 2020 the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will take effect a new Privacy legislation being introduced in the Golden State similar to the EU GDPR changes. Cybersecurity and Data Breaches will be hot topics for the next decade, with the rise of even more security solutions in the market and collaborations between vendors helping organisations to keep data at rest even more secure.

Are the Privacy Legislations having an effect? It surprises me with all the discussions and the awareness, we are seeing more breaches. 90,000 incidents reported in 2019. Microsoft witnessed a huge data breach during the early part of 2019, with a support agent’s credentials being compromised on it’s email services. Although the number of users affected has not been disclosed, Microsoft confirmed that around six percent (6%) of those involved would have had their emails hacked. 6% mail accounts were exposed, we estimate over 10 million mailboxes (April 2019) had their mailboxes hacked, sender and recipient email addresses obtained, folder names, subject lines of emails between January and March 2019.

As predicted in my 2018 annual review, we witnessed in 2019, very large fines being imposed on organisations. The top 10 large fines have exceeded £400+ million. The largest recorded fine with British Airways, fined over £200m, due to around half a million customer records, personal and payment information being exposed in a data breach.

Given the size of the fines, has meant cybersecurity matters are now a regular boardroom agenda item. This will continue to be the case as we enter the new decade. What was an IT Manager’s responsibility, has now become a dedicated person with a title, Chief information security officer (CISO). In 2019, 24% of CISOs report to a chief information officer (CIO), while 40% report directly to a chief executive officer (CEO), and 27% bypass the CEO and report to the board of directors.

Cryoserver has a great Cybersecurity message and can reduce the risks associated with the inevitable data breaches. We have seen behavioural changes with many of our customers, changing the way they work, keeping emails in inboxes and sent items for as little time as possible. In some cases, only 1 month’s worth of data being kept in user mailboxes. If a user is searching for an email they just drop into the Cryoserver secure archive, an encrypted repository, which puts data out of reach of the hackers, and can find the email in split seconds.

On the technology front we have seen waves of changes over the past decade and looking into 2020 and beyond, we will see more dependency on open source solutions being used by Vendors and Data Centre providers. We have already seen this with our own deployments using technologies such as OpenStack, Kubernetes, Docker, Ubuntu, CentOS, RedHat, Solr, Grafana & Prometheus to name a few.

“Serverless computing” is set to be a big trend in 2020 and beyond. Whilst the term is quite misleading because applications still use servers to run. However, with serverless computing, the cloud provider manages code execution when required and only charges for it when the code is running, similar to a ‘Pay-as-you-go’ concept. With the adoption of serverless computing, businesses can avoid maintaining servers and producing code, and making business and developments more agile.

The arrival of 5G is set to revolutionise cloud computing and the IoT as we know it. Being 100 times faster than 4G, making us more agile, the rollout is expected to help see a growth of mobile cloud applications across all industries. The IoT (Internet of Things) will be an everyday occurrence for everyone, going far beyond just our mobile phones. This can be from the home appliances you use to even the floor that you walk on. Such a speed increase means businesses using unified communications services can take advantage of 5G’s lower latency capabilities, allowing for faster messaging and file transfers.

2020 will see cloud computing businesses offering more features and options to users than ever before, while remote workers will enjoy the benefits of faster hotspots to complete their work and with improved internet speeds into the home, we will see more home & flexible working being encouraged, with less time commuting / traveling will see productivity improvements.

What does Cryoserver have lined up for in 2020? Our next version aims to make it even more simpler and quicker to access your email bringing 20:20 vision to all your email. Previews are coming in early 2020.