The cloud storage industry every couple of years seems to reinvent itself. The last few years saw a focus on developing better ways to tie legacy on-premises storage with storage in hybrid and public multi-cloud infrastructures. And now the emphasis is on protecting cloud-based data, not only from hurricanes and power disruptions, but primarily from cybersecurity attacks, especially ransomware.

Cybersecurity has become a major concern of businesses that have implemented perimeter protection to keep out attacks. Cloud storage vendors, on the other hand, are increasingly tackling the issue of what happens when an attack inevitably gets through and either deletes or modifies the data or attaches new attacks to the data that can be sprung if it is recovered. They are responding with technologies such as air gapping, which is a way to keep data detached from the rest of the IT infrastructure so that it cannot be seen or touched by an application; immutability, which ensures that data cannot be deleted or modified without proper authorization; and new ways of authorizing specific users to access data.

As part of CRN’s 2023 Cloud 100, these 20 cloud storage vendors have come up with innovative ways to not only store data but keep it safe.