FEATURE: DATA MANAGEMENT
The consolidation challenge
With the ever-increasing amount of
money that extensive data storage is
costing businesses, being able to consolidate
all of this is crucial to bring these prices
down and increase the efficiency of the
existing storage solutions. However, this is
rarely an easy job for a business to carry out
– but why?
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answer, it is not always a feasible option
for every organisation and so physical
storage must continue to exist. There is
also the increasing issue of having control
over your data – different departments or
sections of a business may have different
rules surrounding data access and storage,
so being able to manage these effectively
without any mix-ups is a must.
Data-centric: The ideal solution
From a technical perspective, challenges
arise because data storage is often driven
by several different initiatives. Since
there’s no ‘one-size-fits-all’ for storage,
businesses typically deploy multiple storage
solutions that manage data at different
performance and cost tiers. Some of these
will be expensive solutions that handle the
constant, active or ‘hot’ data that employees
are using every single day. Others will be
more simplistic storage options that store
any ‘cold’ data which is used less often.
Because of these contrasting workloads,
consolidating the data across these is tough
to manage.
Additionally, aside from the technical
challenges, there are also the difficulties
caused by both organisational and financial
aspects. Companies are now becoming more
distributed than ever before, so managing
the data across many different locations is
creating an entirely new obstacle. Although
cloud can appear to be the most suitable
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INTELLIGENTCIO
For businesses to effectively manage their
storage solutions without bills soaring
through the roof, a strategic approach to
data management is the answer, particularly
when it comes to their unstructured data.
Often, rising storage and backup costs are
not because of the storage, but rather they
are a result of poor data management.
To help reduce these costs, there are four
key steps that should be followed in every
storage solution for businesses to ensure that
they can get the best use out of their data:
1. Data searching and collecting:
Teams need a mechanism to collect
all of the data
2. Index: Once an index is built, from here
teams can search across all data held by
the organisation
3. Analysis: Teams can study the data to
pull the required conclusions
4. Actions: Finally, the necessary actions
can be taken as a result of the analysis
Implementing security and threat
management is vital within step four, as this
is the stage where the knowledge gained
from the analysis can be used to provide the
most beneficial result for the business. For
example, any areas that are vulnerable to
cyberthreats can be identified and a security
solution can be found and implemented to
reduce the risk to the business. Additionally,
by introducing data augmentation into this
process, IT teams can improve the quality of
the data itself and technology such as image
recognition can add additional tags to data
that can help employees to find the exact
files they are looking for, quicker.
Customers will always desire more visibility
when it comes to their own data, as they
want to reap the most value from it. But the
challenge facing them is, how can they get
this regardless of where their data is being
stored? Having a data-centric approach
that is storage-agnostic – as opposed to
other approaches such as data protection-
based – is the best solution that businesses
can adopt. This provides them with the
visibility first, so that they can then increase
efficiency and ROI, and in turn unlock the
value of their data.
Data-centric vs the alternatives
The simplicity and ease with which IT teams
can integrate a data-centric approach is one
of the main reasons why it is so perfect for so
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