Data is your company’s most valuable asset. Unlike most of your assets, data grows almost without effort, as mobile, internet of things, and unstructured data sources add their volume. The value grows too, but that requires effort: using analytics adds value to the decision-making process throughout the enterprise, but making sure those tools generate valid insight means making sure the data is high quality. Managing and protecting data is the most important issue data centers face.
Managing Massive Data Effectively
The challenge is how to store, protect, and make accessible all this data at manageable cost. Building walls is no longer a solution, because it blocks the agility today’s business needs. And walls block the users outside your company, the customers, partners, and vendors who need direct access to your data in ways that never used to happen.
Satisfying those users means coming up with solutions that offer:
- high capacity. Data growth isn’t going to slow down, and data’s going to be kept longer. Although you may archive data to preserve it for compliance purposes, there’s no such thing as data that isn’t needed any more. Analytics demands historical data, and you can’t tell what’s going to be relevant so you can’t easily identify data to discard.
- low latency. Getting the data to the analytics processors quickly enough to be useful means placing the data near where it’s needed and having high-performance networks. This is especially true if you’re building real-time analytics solutions, but even analytics that can number-crunch overnight need to access large volumes of data rapidly.
- high availability. Because the business runs on data, the business shuts down when your systems do. Downtime needs to be minimized and recovery processes optimized to keep the business going.
- accessibility. Effective analytics pulls together data from a variety of sources to find hidden patterns. Analytics developers need to be able to access data stored in multiple formats and multiple locations to develop their tools. Impatient users can’t wait for slow technology teams to respond and need self-service solutions so they can access data when they need it.
- security. Data needs protection more than ever, and not just because it’s valuable to you. You store data that’s of vital importance to its owner, personally identifiable information that you’re legally responsible for protecting—and with new data privacy regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) coming online in the new year, you have potentially expensive liability if data is mishandled or exposed.
New storage technologies can potentially help you resolve these issues, with hyperconverged systems and cloud making it easy to add capacity. Yet virtualization comes with its own set of challenges, including vendor management and coping with legacy systems while building a new strategy to carry data into the future.
Implementing a data management strategy to meet all these complex needs is what dcVAST excels at. Our team’s years of experience with diverse storage technologies let us offer a variety of solutions, including cloud, backup, Disaster Recovery as a Service, hyperconverged systems, and other strategies to customize a strategy to meet your needs. Contact us to learn more about how our data management insight can help you gain control over your data and storage management challenges.
