Modern enterprises create, collect, and store tremendous volumes of data. Companies generate and ingest data from a wide range of internal and external sources, including Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, social media, advanced analytics applications, and customer feedback. They must efficiently store information such as extensive machine learning (ML) training datasets, transaction logs, and sensitive customer data.
Along with its people, an organization’s data resources are among its most valuable assets. The data must be readily available when needed to support business operations and provide timely customer service. Teams must ensure that data is managed and stored securely and efficiently to protect it from unauthorized use, corruption, and loss.
This article examines aspects of a company’s data assets that its Chief Information Officer (CIO) should know about when making decisions that affect its storage management practices and strategies.
How Storage Impacts Modern Businesses
Data storage directly impacts many facets of modern businesses, not just the IT department. CIOs must understand the critical nature of enterprise storage management and its multiple impacts on a company’s ability to thrive and compete effectively.
- IT Costs: Storage is a significant factor in IT costs and cloud spending. Organizations may mismanage storage in multiple ways, including using premium storage tiers for infrequently accessed data, retaining data that should be deleted, and creating redundant copies across multi-cloud environments. Companies face rising costs, even with effective management, due to the growth in overall data volume and regulatory compliance requirements.
- Performance and user experience: Teams running data-driven applications, such as analytics or AI workloads, require high-throughput and low-latency storage to meet performance demands. Customer-facing apps also rely on streamlined performance to provide a satisfactory user experience.
- Scalability: A company’s storage strategy and architecture impact its ability to scale to address business growth or changing requirements. Legacy storage solutions can hinder integration with modern cloud features such as serverless computing or microservices. Companies gain flexibility and scalability by adopting a cloud-native storage strategy.
- Security and compliance: Organizations must implement a storage strategy that ensures data security and regulatory compliance. The storage methods must protect data from breaches using measures such as secure access management and encryption. Companies processing regulated data are required to maintain data availability and traceability, and to be able to recover in the event of a disaster.
- Enterprise innovation: Teams require accessible and optimized storage to train ML models, process real-time IoT data, and run advanced analytics. These data-driven activities benefit from high-bandwidth object storage and tiered storage for large datasets. Companies will be unable to compete effectively or leverage emerging business opportunities with inferior storage management.
- Business continuity: Enterprise storage systems must be robust to avoid downtime and support disaster recovery. Companies that fail to address storage reliability and data recovery risk loss of revenue, operational disruption, reduced customer trust, and compliance violations. Teams must adopt measures such as automated backups, disaster recovery planning, and geo-redundant storage to ensure business continuity.
- Cloud flexibility: Companies supporting hybrid and multi-cloud environments need to leverage interoperable, standards-based storage to facilitate workload migration between clouds and avoid vendor lock-in. Teams may find it impossible to integrate proprietary data storage solutions with cloud environments, limiting business value and opportunities.
Best Practices for Enterprise Storage Management
CIOs should consider these storage management best practices when balancing costs, performance, security, scalability, and compliance.
Data classification and tiered storage
Companies must classify and treat data according to its value and importance to the business. Teams should identify hot, warm, and cold data assets so they can be stored appropriately. Hot, high-value, and frequently accessed data should be stored on high-performance hardware. Warm data can be stored in less expensive tiers that still enable efficient access. Organizations can use cost-efficient archival storage for cold data and long-term retention.
Businesses can achieve substantial savings and increased performance by effectively using different storage tiers. Teams should implement automated lifecycle management to move data between tiers as it ages or if its usage patterns change. The key to efficient tiering is data classification based on company-wide policies to ensure consistency.
Consistent backup and disaster recovery
Organizations must have reliable, consistent backup and disaster recovery procedures in place to safeguard the environment from data loss or corruption caused by internal and external threat actors or natural events. Teams should adopt the 3-2-1 rule that requires three copies on at least two different types of media, with one kept offsite or in immutable storage for ransomware protection. Companies should leverage backups across regions for enhanced resiliency.
Decision-makers must ensure that disaster recovery plans address all business-critical systems and are regularly updated to reflect changes in the environment. Recovery teams should test the plan to evaluate and update procedures when necessary. A business’s survival can rest on its disaster recovery capabilities.
Modernize and automate
Companies should transition from legacy on-premises storage solutions to modern cloud-based alternatives. This transition can reduce costs and complexity while providing better performance, flexibility, and scalability. Teams should introduce automation wherever possible, for example, to automate backups, ensuring consistency, and eliminating the chance of human error.
Strong data governance
Businesses can implement effective storage management with strong data governance policies. Teams should standardize naming conventions and classification criteria across the environment to support efficient storage tiering. Companies must define data retention and deletion policies to support data minimization and optimize resource usage.
VAST’s Storage Management Solutions
VAST’s expert technical teams offer solutions that address many aspects of enterprise storage management. We understand the value of your data resources and provide services to manage them effectively on-premises or in the cloud. Our team ensures your data is secure and available when you need it.
Our Cloud Backup-as-a-Service (CBaaS) offering protects your data and eliminates the overhead of implementing and maintaining an on-premises backup infrastructure. The solution scales easily as your business grows.
Companies of any size can protect their mission-critical systems and business with VAST’s Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS). We leverage AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery to enhance resiliency and provide multiple recovery options.
Contact VAST today to learn how we can help your company manage its valuable data effectively, save money, and safeguard your business.
