Data protection trends to follow in 2025
In 2024, data protection strategies and solutions pivoted toward cyber security more than ever. With cyberattacks like ransomware directly impacting access to data and applications, the role of data protection in the security framework has become vital. Similarly, data protection became a focus of increased government regulations and changing industry standards. What’s more, 2024 saw a growing interest in moving to new virtualization platforms across nearly all industries. Let’s discuss these trends in greater detail.
Cyber vaults
One growing trend in 2024 was protecting data and applications in secure cyber vaults—a trend that will likely continue to ramp up in 2025. Compromising data protection solutions has become a common part of cyberattacks. Traditional data protection topologies are not always enough to protect data, and many protection strategies have begun implementing cyber vaults to address this. But how does a cyber vault work?
A cyber vault is a data protection solution that uses isolation and immutability to protect recovery data from cyber criminals. Typically, a second copy of the recovery data is created, stored physically or logically isolated from the network, and made immutable. There are a variety of cloud vaults on the market using logical isolation within virtual networking. Combined with immutability, these vaults offer a higher level of protection than traditional data protection. For the most secure protection, on-premises vaults using physical isolation put recovery data in a location that can only be accessed in-person within the data center.
As the sophistication of cyberattacks grows, more secure measures are necessary to ensure data can be recovered without having to pay ransoms to attackers. We have seen organizations adopting cyber vaults at an increasing rate and interest continues to grow for secure protection of data that attackers cannot access.
Compliance
With cyberattacks threatening data and disrupting not just privacy but the ability of organizations to function as part of the economy and supply chain, more regulations like the Digital Operational Resilience ACT (DORA) in the EU are coming into existence. DORA is a step beyond earlier regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Network and Information Security (NIS2) Directive, as well as data privacy and security regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
2024 was a significant year for updating compliance, as organizations needed to prepare for DORA’s implementation in January 2025. However, there is still plenty of work to do in 2025 and beyond to meet increasingly scrutinized standards. Like GDPR, DORA has requirements far beyond the EU for the global economy. These regulations are creating the standards by which organizations must comply with if they wish to do business globally.
Data protection is a key part of the operational resilience outlined in DORA, and when combined with other regulations for data privacy and security like GDRP, SOX, and HIPAA, protecting and recovering sensitive data is crucial for compliance. Cyber vaults and other emerging data protection technologies are going to play key roles in helping organizations achieve compliance now and in the coming years.
Workload mobility and hybrid clouds
The Broadcom acquisition of VMware at the end of 2023 kicked off a growing trend in 2024 of organizations investigating and executing moves to new virtualization platforms. We are also seeing a trend in organizations repatriating from cloud platforms to on premises. While cloud repatriation is not a new trend in 2024, it is continuing into 2025.
This combination of moving between virtualization and cloud platforms is creating new hybrid cloud infrastructures spanning multiple cloud and on-premises infrastructures. And even with cloud repatriation, data protection to cloud platforms is still a popular option because it offers a ready-made, remote, and elastic infrastructure to recover to in the event of a disaster.
Data protection solutions are needed between these varying combinations of platforms, both for on-premises DR sites and the cloud. As more organizations look to move to new virtualization platforms in 2025, data protection strategies and solutions will need to follow suit to provide protection for these new and emerging platforms.
Undoubtedly, new trends will emerge in 2025. We expect to continue to see an increased focus on security in data protection, as well and hybrid cloud protection. Looking ahead, we will continue to track these trends and provide data protection solutions as a leader in the industry.
David Paquette 
