Intelligent Data Centres Issue 15 | Page 42

EXPERT OPINION past year, with over a quarter (27%) suffering data loss in the last six months. The research also uncovered issues around the budget and complexity of IT infrastructure, which will add to the challenge of ransomware preparedness. • Nearly half (46%) of respondents reported that they do not have the budget to manage their data and recover from a failure adequately. • Again, nearly half (49%) of respondents reported they have between three and five different types of systems to manage and protect data. And 33% have six or more different types of systems. StorageCraft data protection, data management and Business Continuity solutions allow organisations to keep their critical information always safe, accessible and optimised with StorageCraft’s powerful data protection offerings delivering instant, reliable and complete data recovery and eliminate downtime. Our innovative converged secondary scale-out storage platform, with integrated data protection, solves data growth challenges, is efficient and easy to use. How does StorageCraft offer a simple but robust data protection offering? ShadowXafe is StorageCraft’s nextgeneration data protection solution. It gives customers affordable access to a simple, comprehensive and cost-effective solution that meets the highest of backup and recovery metrics attainable. It is easy to manage, affordable and robust, ensuring constant data availability and uptime for businesses. Benefits include complete data protection. By making all data retroactively restorable within seconds, ransomware is no longer a threat. Customers can scale at speed and with ease because ShadowXafe can restore any device or an entire IT infrastructure from a single console. ShadowXafe ensures total Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Florian Malecki, International Product Marketing Senior Director of StorageCraft by replicating data to a public cloud, a StorageCraft Cloud for a complete Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service or an off-premises location, all with uncompromising reliability, speed and simplicity. In addition to ShadowXafe, OneXafe is a converged data platform that unifies enterprise-class data protection with scale-out storage in an easy-to-use, configurable solution. For businesses looking to protect and manage their data in heterogeneous environments, OneXafe eliminates complexity and provides flexible deployment to accommodate various workload requirements. It significantly reduces costs associated with secondary storage as well as data protection software. By providing a converged solution, OneXafe removes the need for siloed point solutions and minimises costs incurred from standalone hardware and software offerings. Data protection services are directly integrated into the distributed object store, delivering powerful backup and recovery, with a workflow optimised for simplified management. OneXafe integrates with StorageCraft Cloud Services, with a single click it provides Business Continuity of data, network and application recovery in StorageCraft’s Cloud. What trends or emerging trends are you seeing in the data protection area? As data volumes continue to grow at an exponential rate, companies must not only store their data; they must approach data management expertly and look to new approaches. These may include: • The ‘prevention era’ will be overtaken by the ‘recovery era’: While data protection remains crucial, in the data recovery era, the sooner organisations adopt a restore and recover mentality, the more they will be able to benefit from successful Business Continuity strategies. • The repatriation of cloud data: Many organisations are embracing the notion of cloud data repatriation. They’re increasingly deploying a hybrid infrastructure in which some data and applications remain in the cloud, while more critical data and applications come back to an onpremises storage infrastructure. • A data-centric approach to storage: Today, companies are generating oceans of data, not all of which is of equal importance. Organisations that recognise this and implement storage policies based on the value of their data will be in a stronger position when it comes to data storage, management and leverage. As such, it’s likely that we will start to see businesses match their most critical servers with their most important data. • Immutable storage for businesses of all sizes: Ransomware will continue to be a scourge to all businesses. It’s more important than ever to protect data with immutable object storage and continuous data protection. Organisations will increasingly look for a storage solution that protects information continuously by taking snapshots as frequently as possible. Companies that capitalise on these new trends and take new approaches to data management and protection will be able to thrive in the digital economy. ◊ 42 Issue 15 www.intelligentdatacentres.com