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emerging from the pandemic may be in a
completely different structure and go-tomarket
than when they went in.
In order to decide which projects are
still viable and which should be paused or
shelved, it is vitally important for businesses
to evaluate them by measuring their
impact across cost and risk during these
uncertain times.
Driving down cost
From a cost-saving perspective, a backup
database can provide one of the most
complete end-to-end views of a business’
estate, the rate of growth, the rate of change
and the location and types of key data. Of
course, if a business has multiple backup
products, it may prevent a single source of
the truth, but it also presents an immediate
cost-saving opportunity and improvement
in service. More often than not, there can
be a 25% reduction in the operational cost
of running backup when consolidated, as
well as providing the opportunity for further
automation and enhancement.
The next step in driving cost out is to then
use that single view to eradicate duplication
and identify the static workloads. Servers or
applications that are now obsolete must be
decommissioned. At this point, a business
may find it really effective to implement a
suite that interfaces with the backup solution
that will not only provide the required GDPR
and PII compliance, but also conduct endto-end
file optimisation. This will take the
identification of redundant, obsolete and
orphaned applications, data and users to
the next level. IT teams that remove over
40% of their primary storage estate will see
a knock-on effect of driving further server,
software and operational savings across the
estate. An added bonus is that it will also
take a substantial chunk out of potential
future cloud utilisation, too.
Now that a business has identified and
optimised its storage need, the IT team
must ask whether it is on the right
platform. There is a very simple way to
view a storage strategy:
• If the data does hard or specialised work,
place it on discrete flash arrays
• If data is accessed and used a lot, put it
on hyperconverged or cloud
“WE HAVE NO
IDEA WHAT THE
NEXT THREE,
SIX, 12 MONTHS
WILL LOOK LIKE
FOR SOCIETY OR
ORGANISATIONS,
NATIONALLY
AND GLOBALLY,
SO AGILITY AND
FLEXIBILITY
WILL BE KEY TO
SUCCESS.
• If data needs to be stored safely and/
or has secondary use, object store is
most efficient
• If none of the above apply, delete it!
While the discrete platform is a relatively
easy decision to make, migrating data
to either the cloud, hyperconverged
infrastructure or object store is a different
matter. With a plethora of hardware- and
software-based solutions, and a potential
management nightmare, it can be quite a
difficult decision for businesses to make.
Choosing the right platform is an article
in itself, but at a top level, a platform that
removes the barriers between on-premises
and cloud gives true data mobility and
abstracts the hardware layer, which can
take over 60% out of a business’ existing
storage cost base.
Reducing risk
The risk profile and attack surface may
have materially changed during the current
situation, with the change in working
practices, acceleration to cloud and a new
set of threats created.
This not only creates a security and
ransomware protection nightmare, but
also presents a new set of challenges
around compliance, data sovereignty and
information management.
Firstly, with the push to home working,
there are now more mobile devices in use
in organisations than ever before, often by
people not used to having key and critical
business information sitting on their kitchen
table. So, not only do we have to ensure that
the basic hygiene of backing these devices
up is followed, but that we don’t allow these
to be an entry point for ransomware.
Modern backup solutions feature AI-driven
pattern analysis on file behaviour. Over the
first week in which a file, or group of files, are
backed up, its rate of change and pattern
of behaviour is measured and assessed.
Should there suddenly be a change to that
behaviour pattern, an alert is raised to the
control centre and passed to the service
management platform to indicate that
there could be an early stage of ransomware
attack. This is extended out to all endpoints,
thus hopefully stopping the attack in its
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