Network Storage

Utilising digital transformation to provide time savings

Tendring District Council, based in Essex, have worked with Sophos and Espria for its IT security needs since 2014. Business challenges Several years ago, Tendring District Council implemented on-premise Sophos Endpoint Protection Advanced and was happy with the solution. More recently, the council has focussed on further digital transformation, moving all services and servers to a cloud environment. With this in mind, and working with Espria, the council opted to transition to cloud-based Sophos Central. Completed in May 2020, Espria supported the organisation in working remotely with an ongoing priority for IT security after a minor ransomware incident caused the team to be highly aware of the prevalence of attacks in their sector. The technical solution The council moved to Sophos Central for cloud-based IT security for endpoints and servers with the added benefit of ransomware protection from Intercept X Advanced with EDR. The council also called in Sophos Professional Services to assist with the installation. Throughout the project, the team at the council used each step as a way of learning about the solutions, which included: • Sophos Central: a unified console for managing Sophos products • Intercept X Advanced for Server with EDR which protects virtual and physical servers without sacrificing performance, including one-click server lockdown • Intercept X Advanced with EDR: a signatureless anti-exploit, anti-ransomware and root cause analysis tool that protects endpoints from advanced threats • Professional services: consultation, implementation and configuration of solutions aligned with security needs and Sophos best practices. Business benefits Sam Wright is Cyber Security and Systems Manager at Tendring District Council. He lists the benefits of the Sophos/Espria partnership and moving to Sophos Central as being: • Automation: the automation in Sophos Central when detecting and alerting potential threats eases the pressure on the IT team • The interface: the team finds the Sophos Central interface very easy to use and issue-free, particularly when working remotely • Threat analysis: Sam was impressed with the Sophos Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) threat analysis in Intercept X Advanced with top threat indicators, live discovery and multiple categories and queries • Behaviour analysis: intercept X Advanced examines the behaviour of attacks rather than definition - a different approach that provides heightened security • Data security: device control within Sophos Central keeps data safe and the council compliant with GDPR • Price: Sam believes he got a good deal from Sophos with customer-specific pricing • Service: “The council is pleased with the service it has received from Sophos and Espria who are there to help whenever it’s needed.” Sam is so pleased with Sophos’ services and the solutions provided that he has recommended them to his peers in the Essex Online Partnership - a collaboration of authorities including emergency services - and he also ran a demo for them. “I’m always happy to recommend Sophos and Espria,” he says. “It’s easy to use, makes complete sense and empowers our technicians. Plus, Sophos is a well-established and trusted company that’s here for the long term. Sophos has definitely played a key role in our digital transformation project. “Our technicians are very happy with Espria and Sophos Central. It makes it easy for them to drill down, review and investigate any issues that arise. It just makes sense, and it empowers our team.”

How to keep your IT running amid power uncertainty

Power outage…what next? It’s easy to take energy for granted. It helps keep us warm, safe, productive, clean, fulfilled, and healthy. However, the latest indicators show that Europe is now going into energy crisis mode. Disruption can negatively impact in many ways. For businesses that rely on critical IT equipment, the potential repercussions of power surges and outages can be devastating. For home and residential environments, the impact of power outages is not to be understated, especially as we approach the colder winter months. This blog article talks about how you can mitigate poor power quality and availability. Read more here.

Enterprise storage trends for 2023: vendors must rise to the challenge

By Eric Herzog, Chief Marketing Officer at Infinidat Looking ahead, 2023 will be a very exciting year for enterprise storage, here are five trends we see emerging. In each case vendors will need to respond quickly with the right solutions, but do they have the right foundations in place to do so? Convergence of cyber security and storage as a cornerstone of an enterprise IT strategy CIOs and CISOs continue to increasingly realise that if they don't combine storage with cyber security, they're leaving a gap in their corporate cyber security strategy. IT leaders are accustomed to protecting the network and endpoints, deploying firewalls and looking at the application layer. However, all of their data ends up on storage. The great awakening in the enterprise market, heading into the new year, is that, if an enterprise storage solution does not have the capabilities to help combat a cyber attack, the C-suite and the IT team are leaving the organisation severely exposed. The trend emerging is for storage that is buoyed by cyber resilience to be part of the overall comprehensive cyber security strategy in every large organisation. This means vendors must offer storage solutions that align with cyber security solutions and strategies commonly used to protect enterprises, as well as cloud hosting providers, managed hosting providers and managed service providers. It will require a vendor and its partners to work closely with CIOs and CISOs, along with other IT leaders and administrators, to make cyber-resilient storage a key part of a comprehensive cyber security strategy, plugging vulnerable gaps and securing the data against cyber attacks. Boosting the ability to make a near-instantaneous recovery from a cyber attack with the highest level of trust in the data The question is not 'if' your organisation is going to be hit with a cyber attack; it’s a question of 'when' and 'how often.' Your organisation will get attacked, and it could get attacked multiple times. At that point, it’s a matter of how you respond to that attack. Cyber resilience is among the most important and highly demanded requirements of enterprises today to combat cyber attacks across the entire storage estate and data infrastructure. Even if your endpoint or your network security keeps the cyber criminals out once or twice, there will surely be times when they get through. When that happens, one of the critical things for an IT team is to get a known good copy of the data and make a speedy recovery. It's crucial to use an immutable snapshot of the data to ensure that the data has not been compromised. In other words, the data can be trusted. Finding a known good copy is done by curating the potential candidates to restore in a fenced forensic environment. The last thing you want to do is just start restoring data that has malware or ransomware infiltrated within it. Vendors will need to offer solutions that combine immutable snapshots of data, a fenced forensic environment, logical air gapping, and virtually instantaneous data recovery - ideally with a rock-solid cyber storage guaranteed SLA. Once a cyber criminal gets through an enterprise’s line of defence, it’s all about resilience and recoverability of the data, building on a known good copy of the data. A cyber resilient storage infrastructure helps you more easily identify threats with automation and put data into a safe, fenced forensic environment. The cyber attack is nullified. Harnessing the capability of anomalous pattern detection to do cyber scanning on secondary storage We’re seeing a trend emerging more broadly in 2023 around cyber scanning with the ability to do anomalous pattern detection, particularly on secondary storage. In the longer term, we see an expansion onto primary storage over the next two to three years. This cyber scanning is another tool in the storage admin’s tool bag, along with cyber resilience, to be proactively strengthening the data infrastructure to handle the ever-increasing sophistication and deceptiveness of cyber attacks. Whether for money, power or perverse entertainment, these attacks are designed to take down your business. Vendors will need to provide anomalous pattern detection capability, possibly through partnerships with backup vendors as part of a wider ecosystem. This is an evolving area of technology and it gives customers the ability to do scanning on secondary storage, adding further value for enterprise customers and partners. Growing demand for ease of deploying cyber storage, resilience, and advanced security technologies Enterprises and service providers are increasingly seeking easy-to-deploy and easy-to-use solutions that meet their needs for cyber storage resilience and integrated security technologies. They want not only automation, but also the next level up with autonomous automation. End-users don’t want complex set-ups anymore. They want to be able to quickly and efficiently access forensic environments, and when it comes to recovery of data, they expect two or three clicks, and then be done with it. Vendors will need to respond with a ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ approach to cyber storage, offering advanced technology that is also easy to deploy and use. Cyber resilience is being recognised as necessary for both primary and secondary storage as a safeguard against cyber attacks and internal threats People often think that cyber storage resilience is only about backing up data. That’s not true. Cyber storage resilience is more than backup. This is an important distinction that speaks to a trend for the next year because smart cyber criminals won’t only attack your secondary datasets, like backup, but also attack your primary datasets. In recognition of this reality, enterprises and service providers are heading into the new year injecting new levels of cyber storage resilience into both their primary and secondary storage environments. There is a shift in the enterprise market starting to happen from being reactive - waiting for the cyber criminals to attack and then doing something about it - to proactively prepare for recovery, likened to disaster recovery. Companies usually have elaborate disaster recovery plans and business continuity measures. There is a growing awareness that 'cyber disaster plans' need to be put in place with the right set of capabilities to initiate and execute rapid recovery. Vendors need to help customers rethink their approaches to cyber storage resilience, shifting approach reactive to proactive. Cyber storage resilience enables an enterprise to nullify a ransomware attack, as if the attack didn’t even happen. No ransom, no disruption and full protection against attacks.

South Lanarkshire Council cuts carbon emissions with IT upgrades

South Lanarkshire Council has transformed its digital and IT provision, resulting in significant carbon savings and helping to streamline the delivery of services to the local authority’s more than 300,000 residents. Working with DataVita, the council will save over 2,000MWh of energy annually - down from 2,222MWh to 140MWh, a 94% reduction. Emissions will also be cut by 95% by migrating data storage to DataVita’s purpose-built DV1 facility. Modernising its IT operations will enable the local authority to reduce the environmental impact of digital systems by tackling excess energy usage and wastage. Over the next five years, an estimated 12,800MWh of energy will be saved, equivalent to the amount of electricity used annually by over 400 average homes. The IT transformation programme is designed around a new hybrid system, combining cloud based activities and data centre hosting at the DV1 facility in Chapelhall. The data centre uses 100% renewable electricity. It also uses energy efficient ‘free cooling’ technology, which utilises Scotland’s natural climate to maintain optimum temperatures, instead of air conditioning units. Switching data centre locations will mean the local authority sees its power usage effectiveness (PUE) ratio improve substantially, from a rating of 2.3 to just 1.18. PUE is an industry benchmark for data centre energy performance that measures how much energy is used by the IT equipment, with 1:1 the optimum ratio. Brian Teaz, Head of Information Technology at South Lanarkshire Council, says, “We have set ambitious targets including a 75% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. Over the last six years we have already reduced that by more than 25%. There is still scope to do more, and this new IT approach is a good example of how modernisation can come with real environmental benefits. “In recent years, as services have been digitised and moved online, our IT footprint has expanded quickly to give residents smarter and more flexible ways to access critical functions. The time was right to upgrade our digital infrastructure in line with new requirements and working with DataVita has enabled us to address sustainability at the same time, making significant carbon savings.” The contract was awarded through the Scottish Government’s Cloud Services Framework, established in 2019 to support the government’s digital strategy. IT supplied through the framework includes public and private cloud, colocation, hybrid cloud, community cloud, and cloud transition activities. Danny Quinn, Managing Director at DataVita, says, “Sustainability is high on the agenda for most organisations, but there is a common misconception that making changes either comes with a downgrade in terms of performance or substantial financial investment. Our recent experience with South Lanarkshire Council proves otherwise, and we have simultaneously upgraded the IT systems and reduced its carbon footprint. With the capability to deliver some of the most advanced technology currently available, our team has designed a flexible future-proofed system to cater for the council’s needs in the years to come.”

Marist College Canberra unlocks IT autonomy with Nutanix

Nutanix helped Marist College Canberra simplify its IT infrastructure and enhance the learning experience of its students and educators. Established in 1968, Marist College Canberra is a Catholic school for boys from years four to 12. The school’s 200 teachers and staff provide a diversity of academic, spiritual, cultural, and personal development opportunities to its 1,800 students.            Sam Walton, ICT Systems and Operations manager, and his five-strong team are responsible for providing the IT infrastructure and rolling out new projects that keep students connected and continue to improve their learning experiences. “From an IT perspective, schools are always a complex environment,” Sam says. “Not only are we a relatively large school with more than 2,000 end-users including students and teachers, but we also offer many extracurricular activities. The role of IT is to support all the different departments and all the applications they want to run in a single environment.” Sam says that maintaining such a complex environment with legacy three-tier data centre architecture including servers, storage and networking - a system created decades ago - would be a resource-intensive challenge. A recent investment in Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure, however, freed Walton and his team to deliver greater value to the school. Sam adds, “Nutanix is the heart of our digital learning experience. We went from a full rack of SANs (storage area networks) and hosts which were much more complicated and required a lot more maintenance just to keep running, to Nutanix which is essentially ‘set up and forget’. “In our IT team, we have to know so much about everything, so the really good thing about Nutanix is that it just works - I can’t be dedicating resources to maintaining the environment every week. The infrastructure we have now means my team can focus on more strategic projects for the college.” Another benefit, according to Sam, has been the reduced hardware footprint which has in turn reduced the college’s energy consumption. “IT infrastructure, particularly outdated infrastructure, can be a major energy burden,” he says. “Instead of a full rack, we’ve gone down to six RU (rack units) in our production environment. This has reduced power consumption to the point we’re now downsizing our UPS, which provides emergency power if the main power source fails.” Marist is also using three Nutanix nodes for its on-campus Disaster Recovery (DR) environment which keeps systems going in the event of an outage, and another three nodes for object storage, which enables greater data scalability for the school. “DR is now instant,” Sam says. “For example, late last year I had to move everything to the DR site and performance wasn’t impacted at all. No one noticed any difference. This has enabled me to sleep at night because I know now if something ever goes wrong, we can seamlessly switch over to DR.” Jim Steed, Managing Director - ANZ at Nutanix, says Marist College Canberra has ensured the best learning experience for its students, both today and into the future. “With its IT team liberated from having to keep the lights on, Walton and the Marist IT team can focus on the things that matter - like improving the student and educator experience - rather than putting out fires and constant maintenance. At Nutanix, we believe IT infrastructure should be invisible so organisations like Marist can focus on what they do best - educating the next generation of Australian leaders,” Jim concludes.      

iM Critical wins award for start-up innovation

iM Critical has announced that it has won the 2022 Tech 50 award from the Pittsburgh Technology Council for the most innovative start-up. The 26th annual event was a gathering of over 600 people - a who’s who of local companies, non-profits, and technologists - highlighting the impact they have made in the region. PTC President and CEO, Audrey Russo, says, “It is truly the biggest night in Pittsburgh’s tech ecosystem each and every year.” With this recognition, which was awarded to the top company in each of 10 categories, iM Critical underscores its role as a resource within this rapidly growing, technology-rich market and amplifies its commitment to delivering mission-critical facilities and IT services. “We are thrilled to be recognised in this way in Pittsburgh, aka Silicon Valley East - a market where iM Critical is delivering sustainably-minded, scalable, high-performance computing platforms. We’re honoured to be highlighted among a group of such fantastic innovators,” says Michael Roark, CEO of iM Critical. “Our unique breed of plug-and-play IT ecosystems, built with all the most pressing IT mandates in mind, offer a truly advantageous space for growth and innovation across healthcare, academic research, AI, IoT, smart cities, and more in an HPC-hungry location. We’re proud to support this incredible market with next-generation sustainability and robust, versatile solutions as it continues on its technological trajectory.” iM Critical’s flagship 10MW, high-performance modular data centre campus in Pittsburgh offers a purpose-built response to the growing mission-critical needs of the marketplace. The company’s full-stack IT solutions and six-nines environment are especially valuable within the greater Pittsburgh market, which has traditionally been constrained by a lack of optimal data centres. iM’s solution enables crucial deployment densification and promotes better efficiencies for supercomputing requirements, offering sustainable advantages where many thought they may never find them. In addition to owning and operating data centres, the company factory builds modular, scalable, and sustainability-focused solutions to revolutionise the way data centres are consumed for the future of high intensity workloads and business goals. iM Critical will be deploying its modular data centres on its phase-one modular campus in December 2022.

NAFFCO FZCO leverages Arcserve 9000 series appliances

In the business of creating and selling safety products, secure IT solutions are a sacrosanct requirement. With more than 15,000 team members - including 2,000 engineers and over 6,000,000ft2 of manufacturing facilities - the NAFFCO FZCO's IT department is crucial to handling critical business applications. However, prior to installing the Arcserve appliances in its main Dubai branch, the company was facing multiple issues, including slow backup performance and even incomplete or failed backups. As the company has grown over the last two decades, the organisation needed IT solutions that were stable and reliable, had multi-site replication, as well as built in data and system backups from ransomware attacks. That's where Arcserve appliances came in. Over the last six months, the company has reported an increase in productivity, as well as application performance and a healthy return on investment. The challenge In its vision to become the world's number one provider of innovative solutions in protecting life, environment and property, NAFFCO's IT infrastructure needed a massive upgrade. According to Mohannad Hennawi, the organisation's Group IT Manager, who manages a team of 20 IT staff team members, the company's previous systems were severely lacking when it comes to backup performance and data security. After a complete IT infrastructure review, Mohannad noticed that slowly and, many times, incomplete backup performance was hampering his team's and the larger organisation's overall performance. More specifically, unsuccessful backup on email exchanges, data protection and ransomware were proving to be troublesome for the company. To modernise its operations and further strengthen its data resilience, NAFFCO needed a new data protection solution that was cost-effective, scalable and flexible with integrated cyber security features to secure its critical digital assets. The solution Working closely with Arcserve local partner Gerab, the 9360DR and 9096DR were deployed in Dubai and Abu Dhabi to protect NAFFCO's 45 physical servers and 100 virtual machines and streamline the organisation's environment. Arcserve appliances provide a self-contained, ‘set and forget’, secure DR and backup solution architected global source-based deduplication, multi-site replication, tape integration, automated data restore capabilities and assured recovery. "After considering and comparing against many vendors, we finally chose the Arcserve appliances as they are easy to manage and whilst being feature-rich, with full cyber security protection against ransomware," says Mohannad. To protect data and system backups from ransomware and other types of malicious attacks, the Arcserve appliances include the Sophos Intercept-X Advanced for Server advanced endpoint protection that combines a signature-based and signatureless malware detection, a deep learning neural network, anti-exploit technology, CryptoGuard anti ransomware and WipeGuard technologies to stop the widest range of end point threats. "After considering and comparing against many vendors, we finally chose the Arcserve appliances as they are easy to manage whilst being feature rich, with full cyber security protection against ransomware," says Mohannad. While the implementation took three days to execute and a week to go online, Mohannad says the process was seamless and ‘smoothly done.' "The management interface is quite simple to understand and use," he comments. "We would recommend providing deep technical training for the team in the future." The result With the assistance of Gerab, NAFFCO first deployed the 9360DR in Dubai's data centre in February 2022. It has more than met the company's needs and expectations, so much so that it led NAFFCO to also purchase the 9096DR for its Abu Dhabi branch. Having seen results within the first week of deployment, the company's Group IT manager is satisfied with how the solutions have helped in increasing productivity by 100%, as well as how it has led to 50% more seamless application performance, and 50% savings in the cost of operations. In the future, the company also aims to install Arcserve Appliances at its Qatar and Saudi Arabia branches. "We need to plan for a backup solution which will be compatible with cloud solutions," concludes Mohannad.

Scality ships RING9, software for hybrid cloud data storage

Scality has announced RING9 - the ninth generation of its RING scale-out file and object storage software - a solution that allows IT teams to build and run a modern hybrid cloud data storage infrastructure with higher performance and efficiency. RING9 is built on major investments in Scality’s flagship RING solution that enables IT teams to:   ● Fully leverage flash media through tiering and dynamic data protection policies ● Modernise monitoring stack with Prometheus tools and APIs ● Streamline integration with API extensions to ecosystem partners such as Veeam and VMware Cloud Director (VCD) With these new capabilities, RING9 further enhances and simplifies scale-out file and object storage for enterprises building private and hybrid cloud storage services with comprehensive AWS S3 and IAM compatibility. “Scality is a strategic object storage provider we trust to house our customer’s data. Over the last several years, we’ve partnered closely with Scality to build a scalable and sovereign cloud service,” explains Laurent Cheyssial, CTO at Jaguar Network. “With the comprehensive AWS-compatible S3 API and user security management in RING9, we now have the flexibility to offer our customers cloud backup services for a wide variety of workloads while keeping data secure.” “Scality continues to innovate in scale-out object and file storage as evidenced by its new multi-tiering capability. This new feature enables high performance with low-latency flash and increases storage efficiency with tiering as data ages. This will improve usages such as backups and medical imaging, as well as new latency-sensitive workloads in media by automatically optimising data placement,” says Randy Kerns, Senior Strategist and Analyst at Evaluator Group. RING9 enhancement focuses High performance and storage efficiency: RING9 augments its use of the latest generations of flash media through the Storage Accelerator (SA), a powerful multi-level tiering capability. This enables dynamic tiering and data protection policies for ultra-fast IO to hot storage tiers via low-latency NVMe flash - with automated movement of data to increasingly more cost-effective tiers on lower-cost flash, such as quad-level cell (QLC), or on traditional hard disk drives (HDD). These enhancements expand the addressable markets and use cases for RING9, and enable IT teams to address Tier 1, latency-sensitive workloads in media streaming, medical imaging and big data analytics that previously required a separate resource. Modern stack administration: RING9 brings monitoring into the modern cloud native data centre, with the integration of a new stack based on Prometheus and AlertManager, a new comprehensive UI dashboard with user actionable alerting. In addition, the Scality Cloud Monitor now enhances remote monitoring and observability for both customers and Scality’s premium Scale Care Services support offerings. Ecosystem integration: RING9 streamlines the integration of its ecosystem partner products into a customer’s architecture, with support for: ● New APIs for enhanced monitoring, reporting and data placement in solutions from ecosystem partners such as Veeam ● Enhanced VMware vCloud (vCD) integration, including production use in existing real-world service provider deployments ● More comprehensive AWS IAM-compatible bucket policies to tighten security and access control Paul Speciale, Chief Marketing Officer at Scality, says, “As IT teams embrace the modern stack architecture, they need solutions that eliminate challenges in enterprise data management and storage in the hybrid cloud. Scality RING9 represents a major step change for the entire storage industry. Users gain improvements in storage efficiency through internal flash-to-disk tiering and dynamic data protection policies. For modern cloud based data centres, RING9 fits naturally into the monitoring and observability ecosystem with support for Prometheus and Elastic Cloud. RING9 expands the addressable market and use-case workloads for RING further into the high-performance arena.”

Neterra launches a new fibre metro network in Sofia

Neterra has built and launched a new, fast and secure fibre metro network in Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. It covers the entire capital, including all important business centres, central streets, and boulevards. Through it, the company offers internet for businesses, protection from DDoS attacks, other connectivity services and media streaming. Qualified engineers are responsible for maintenance and provide technical support 24/7. Neterra's new network has several major advantages compared to the networks of other operators. It is the only fibre network that reaches all the data centres in Sofia, enters them, and connects them. This includes both Neterra's data centres and those of other operators. Another benefit is that cables are run deeper underground and in protected conduits to prevent risks of outages. For the Sofia fibre metro network, the company uses the most modern and high-quality equipment - from cables to optical distribution frames (ODF) and connectors. As a result, the connection is of exceptional quality. In the capital of Bulgaria, Neterra maintains over 550 active business services and consciously invests in reliable components. Thanks to the large capacities set in advance, Neterra's metro network is expected to meet the needs of businesses in Sofia for years to come. At the same time, it is connected to the Bulgarian core fibre network of the company, which connects all major Bulgarian cities such as Varna, Veliko Tarnovo, Burgas, Plovdiv and Ruse.

Fintech companies to explore data storage locations to meet sustainability goals

FINTECH Circle, in partnership with Bulk Data Centres, has released a report that found that companies’ growing concern about their environmental impact is a major factor in determining where to store their data.  In a survey of senior executives in the fintech and financial services sector, the report - The Data Usage Barometer - explores the broad trends taking place across fintech. It showed that finance increasingly relies on data and energy intensive technologies, with artificial intelligence expected to be the technology that will be most vital to future growth, followed by machine learning. Over a third of survey respondents had seen an increase of 50-100% in data usage and storage needs in the past three years, and more than a third of the survey respondents predicted growth of at least two times in the next three years, with half of that group expecting an increase of more than five times. Susanne Chishti, CEO of FINTECH Circle, says, “From embedded finance, digital assets including cryptocurrencies, trading platforms, and global payment solutions, fintech is disrupting and reshaping our lives. Central to this growth is where companies process their large volumes of data, and our survey shows that the majority of companies have explored or plan to explore alternatives to their current data storage infrastructure.” Half of the respondents said they are concerned about their company’s environmental impact and an even higher number agree that lowering their firm's carbon footprint is an ethical concern. Warren Barrie, Director of Bulk Data Centres, says, “Fintech has taken off in recent years and the sector is revolutionising our relationship with financial services. At its core, is the focus of ‘fintech for good’, which is based on the power of the sector to improve society and to be a custodian of sustainable products and services. “Companies are not just concerned about their shareholder returns but increasingly about their ethical and sustainable impact. This includes the upstream supply chain and where they store their data. We, at Bulk Data Centres, are committed to helping fintech companies by offering long-term sustainable solutions at much lower costs to European counterparts.” Some of the additional key findings include: • Two-thirds of respondents said AI will be vital to their future growth, with ML being the second most selected at 41%. • A third of survey respondents predicted growth of at least two times in the next three years, with half of that group expecting an increase of more than five times. • Data sovereignty and compliance are the top concerns over growing data usage and storage, selected by over half of respondents. • Security is the top requirement for data storage and processing, followed by reliability, ability to scale and then cost.