The scale of data and the pace of data growth today create vast challenges for data management and data protection. To ensure they can keep data safe and extract its value, businesses need to invest in data protection solutions that can cope with these new volumes of data.
Big Data’s Data Protection Challenges
Before identifying a solution to the data protection challenge, it’s important to understand where the challenges arise from. There are many types of challenges:
• Coping with data volume and velocity. By definition, the scale of big data is large. It also accumulates rapidly. Simply keeping track of what you’ve accumulated so you can ensure it’s protected properly is hard. Data protection needs to be able to quickly scale along with the data.
• Coping with data variety. The third “V” of big data, variety, creates another data protection challenge. Meaningful data that requires protection isn’t just in databases. Data comes from numerous sources, including internet of things sensors, forum comments, text and chat messages, audio and video files, tweets, documents, spreadsheets, photos, and nonrelational databases. The variety makes developing a management, integration, and control solution hard,
• Keeping important data safe. Much of the above data used to be unimportant to businesses. A customer service representative might respond to a comment in a chat, but there was no further value to that. Today’s analytics find value in all forms of business data, and data is much more important to the business as derived insights drive more business decisions.
• Protecting against more threats. The onslaught of malware is never-ending, and ransomware presents a particular threat to businesses that depend on data to guide both long-term strategic plans and daily operations.
• Meeting more controls. There’s much more public awareness and control over business usage of their data. Organizations need to comply with multiple data protection regulations, including GDPR.
• Less control over data. Data resides in more environments that aren’t under business control. This includes the cloud, as well as mobile devices and laptops used by remote workers. Shadow IT and rampant use of email and unapproved cloud to distribute documents puts the business at risk.
Data Protection for Big Data
Overcoming those challenges requires data protection tools such as those from Veritas. These tools provide features such as:
• Backup. Quickly create data backups using the same tools on all platforms. Secure copies of important data provide support for recovery from disasters including outages and malware. Recovery tools provide speedy access to backups.
• Copy data management. Self-service solutions speed up development projects while ensuring that data copies are created by authorized users and protected from inappropriate use.
• Archiving. Historic copies of data are safely stored for use in analytics projects, e-discovery, or satisfaction of legal requirements. Cloud makes storage and management of large volumes of historic data simpler.
• Data understanding. You can’t manage data you don’t know exists. Tools help business identify data and typical patterns of usage, allowing it to be brought under control and potential threats identified.
Vast IT Services provides support for the full suite of Veritas solutions. Contact us to learn more about data protection for big data.
