The very name “cloud” implies a lack of visibility. While using cloud gives companies important benefits, it can be harder to keep an eye on your resources, data, and costs in the cloud than it is when those items reside in your own data center. Finding ways to gain visibility over cloud resources supports:
- Cost control. Much of the data businesses store is data that is a copy of other data or is not used. Although storage is often considered cheap, when 30 percent of the data you store is unneeded, that becomes a noticeable expense. The rise of big data and machine-generated data means there’s a lot of data being collected that isn’t part of any workflow.
- Business analytics. Getting value from your analytics means they need to have complete, comprehensive data sets to reason about. If you’ve got data scattered through the cloud and don’t know what’s stored where, the inputs to your analytics will be incomplete and can lead to bad output, too.
- Backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity planning. It’s important to know what data resides in the cloud so you can include it in your crisis management plans. Even the cloud has occasional outages, so you need your own strategy. When you don’t know data’s stored in the cloud, your plans will be missing necessary recovery steps that can impact your business when it’s already struggling to function.
- Risk management. Your data security and compliance rules need to protect all your data, including data in the cloud. Making sure appropriate permissions are granted, logging user access, and protected data from unauthorized exposure starts by knowing where the data is and who is using it.
There are several ways you can get visibility into your cloud.
Amazon CloudWatch
If your business uses Amazon Web Services, you can use Amazon CloudWatch to monitor your Amazon resources. Its logs can help identify changes from the normal usage pattern, alerting you to potential risks.
Veritas Cloud Visibility Resources
Veritas is known for its 360 data management that provides visibility of data wherever it resides. Veritas Information Map is designed to provide visibility into your data, with metadata analysis to help you understand file types and data content. Connectors extend Information Map’s capability to Amazon Web Services as well as Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud, with access to emails and storage. Veritas Data Insight helps you monitor access to files to reduce risk, while Enterprise Vault archives data (including cloud-based data) and eDiscovery Platform enables you to search that data to meet legal requirements.
Are you concerned about losing visibility and the ability to track and control your data in the cloud? Through our support for Amazon Web Services and partnership with Veritas, we help our clients implement tools and processes that ensure data doesn’t get lost in the cloud. Contact us to learn how you can use these tools to keep an eye on your data in the cloud.
