Businesses often struggle to keep up with the pace of change in technology, and there is probably more change than ever at the moment.

With that in mind here are three big trends that look set to have a significant impact on organisations. It’s worth getting up to speed with these as quickly as you can – if you’re not already.

The cloud will continue to grow

In the next 12 months we’re likely to see even more applications moving to the cloud, driven by strong adoption of packages such as Microsoft Office 365 and Google Docs as primary office tools.

These office applications have helped people get used to working in their browsers, so will see many other business systems and moving to the cloud – indeed graphical editors and other specialised software is already there.

Of course, with applications moving to the cloud, people will store more data in the cloud services – including everything used and modified by the cloud apps they are using.

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This means businesses will need solutions to help them manage data distributed across a wide array of cloud services.

These solutions will need to allow businesses to aggregate data from multiple sources and then provide convenient and easy to use search and access functionality.

…and Blockchain will become a core requirement

With data becoming even more distributed thanks to the growth of cloud-based applications, it will be crucial for businesses to be able to ensure that data is authentic and has not been modified.

This is likely to drive adoption of public immutable registries based on Blockchain technology.

With data in the cloud, even more legal paperwork will go to the cloud and electronic documents will become more prominent and this will be an additional driver for Blockchain-based public registers for signatures.

This will slowly start to replace proprietary services that are more prone to hacker attacks due to the single source of authority.

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Data protection is one of the areas where Blockchain will gain popularity in 2017. It will be used to watermark protected data and to provide a mechanism to verify the integrity of data in the future.

Following a year of major announcements of new Blockchain projects in different industries, 2017 will be a year when pilot projects will be going live.

It will be interesting to see the first reports of Blockchain use by large corporations in real life situations.

…and ransomware is here to stay

Ransomware is a rapidly expanding cybercrime pandemic. Throughout 2016 there have been a number of widely publicised cases where victims had to pay thousands of dollars just to get their data back. According to various reports, ransomware is a USD $1 billion industry.

Ultimately this means four things:
1) Data is valuable
2) Cybercriminals are quicker to attack data than victims are to it
c) Victims are prepared to pay a high price to recover their data
d) Many businesses and organisations are unprepared to deal with these attacks

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Given the “success” of ransomware this year, it’s only logical to assume that this problem will become much worse on 2017.

Next year is likely to be remembered as the year of “ransomware pandemic”, which will continue until people are educated about the dangers of this cyber virus, and data protection companies develop an appropriate “vaccine” with automated data healing mechanisms and guaranteed data availability.

Sourced by Gaidar Magdanurovis, vice president and general manager, consumer and online business at Acronis