Old-school thinking is that secondary storage is unimportant. It can be safely ignored. The new way of thinking today is that secondary storage is vitally important to your digital transformation. Digital transformation relies on data, and there’s much more data on secondary storage. Managing it haphazardly makes it hard to access and use the data, meaning decisions continue to be made on incomplete data and digital transformations don’t succeed. Taking a strategic approach to secondary storage is necessary for companies to incorporate the data into the digital transformation.

Hyperconverged Secondary Storage Solutions

Hyperconverged secondary storage solutions such as that from Cohesity provide a cost-effective storage platform for secondary storage and enables businesses to actively use the data on those devices. Like all hyperconverged infrastructure, Cohesity is built from standardized nodes that make it easy to expand and simple to manage.

The devices support analytics workloads and copy data management, and are also easily integrated with the cloud, features that make it easy to work with the data. Secondary data can easily be leveraged to create development and test environments and increase the agility of the development process.

In addition to speeding software development, this type of secondary storage simply makes secondary data more available to the business for business purposes. Rather than being locked away, the data can add to big data analytics and provide additional insight to drive business decisions.

Using Secondary Storage for Digital Transformation

The value of using secondary storage to promote digital transformation is clear, but getting started is difficult because of how the storage has been managed until now. You need to begin by discovering what data you have and where it’s being stored. Along with that, you need to identify who is responsible for managing that data and whether there’s appropriate security; if you don’t know that, you don’t know whether the data’s valid and worth incorporating into your analytics processes.

Once you’ve determined that, you can begin moving the most valuable secondary data to secondary storage platforms where it can be used. When comparing platforms, consider the performance, scalability, cloud integration, and metadata management capabilities that will let you use your data easily. Also look for features that will help you manage your storage, such as storage analytics and automation engines to apply backup retention policies.

Start using your secondary storage to transform your business. Contact dcVAST to learn more about the Cohesity hyperconverged secondary storage platform.