During the most recent edition of The IT Press Tour in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, Information Age spoke to Luc D’urso, CEO at Atempo, about how to get data management, protection and storage right, while exploring the company’s role and the benefits of a European approach to data.
The data management and protection challenge
According to D’urso, “data management and protection technologies are struggling to evolve in today’s challenging environments: exponential growth of unstructured data, aging storage technologies, stricter data regulations and so on.”
He explained that the traditional technologies used to move, protect or archive data no longer work effectively in this new paradigm.
“It is not possible for organisations to maintain such large volumes of data on expensive primary storage, nor is it possible to have everything on long-access offline storage,” he said.
Regardless of sector, each with their own independent challenges, data is becoming a real source of competitive advantage for the enterprises. The main challenge is learning to preserve it, to anticipate its growth and be agile in adapting data management processes in order to survive in very competitive environments.
Atempo’s role
To address these challenges, Atempo has developed Miria, a data management platform that is designed to address enterprise challenges for massive volumes of data.
This solution aims to:
• Break down data silos to better understand, better manage and better exploit the company’s data. For example, to avoid duplicate storage, or simply to be able to locate data as close as possible to the resources that use it, and of course to be able to archive the coldest data or data that needs to be kept for a long time.
• Move data freely between storage systems, regardless of brand or technology: from one manufacturer to another, from on-premises storage to the cloud and vice versa.
• Create a holistic view of this data to anticipate storage needs and negotiate storage costs as best as possible, and to truly put data to work for the business.
D’urso presented an example of the work Atempo is doing with a major Hollywood Studio, who needed to change their legacy storage for a different vendor.
He said: “The primary challenge of the studio was the large number of files. The customer had two sites to migrate with substantially identical volumes. The total 1.25 PB volume was scanned in nine hours, synced in less than 12 days (over 100 TB/day), and incremental syncs lasted only 30 minutes.
“Atempo’s Miria successfully performed successive synchronisations to the new storage until the final cutover without any production downtime on the legacy storage. There were zero metadata or ACL issues.”
The European approach to data
European tech offers a serious alternative to US and Chinese models when it comes to data.
It’s also a necessary alternative and must have an evolution towards European technologic autonomy, according to D’urso.
“The loss of economic autonomy will impact political power. In other words, data and economic frailty will only further weaken Europe’s role at the global power table and open the door to a variety of potential flash points (military, cyber, industrial, social and so on).
“Europe should be proud of its model, which re-injects tax revenues into a fair and respectful social and cultural framework. The GDPR policy is clearly at the heart of a European digital mindset.”
Luc went further and suggested that data regulation, including management, protection and storage, is central to the upcoming French presidential election and the current French Presidency of the Council of the European Union.
“The French Presidency of the Council of the EU will clearly place data protection into the spotlight of political debates. It is not about protectionism, but Europe must safeguard its data against foreign competition to enhance its autonomy and build a prosperous future.
“Sovereignty is essential because in any digital economy, data is considered the raw material of prosperity. Assisted by technologies such as AI and soon quantum computing, European sovereignty will condition our regional autonomy, employability, attractiveness, and our ability to meet tomorrow’s challenges,” he added.
Individual responsibility
To protect digital assets, on-premises or in the cloud, organisations must implement an effective data protection and management infrastructure.
“Being dependent on US or Chinese or any other non-European technology to protect the source of European competition is an economical risk,” advised D’urso.
Individual companies should be responsible for their data and should be able to recover it in the event of an unplanned incident that leads to data loss. They should be transparent in their data protection strategy and resilient to risks.
Regional data control
In concluding, Luc said that to counter American and Chinese dominance, with their monopoly on exploiting the value of data, Europe must regain control of its digital destiny and rely on its industrial sector to build trustworthy cloud platforms and infrastructures.
“Labels can now be granted to European cloud providers who commit to respect the highest standards in terms of data protection and data privacy.
“In terms of sovereignty, only data control will allow Europe to assert itself internationally, showing that there is a digital “third way” that genuinely respects fundamental freedoms,” he added.
