No organisation today can be successful without first mastering its data and reducing its data management complexity. Customers expect ubiquitous and fluid access to services provided by their favourite brands. This means they have to be always on and, crucially, always secure. This is only possible when businesses know what application data they have, where it is held, and how to make sure it’s always available and protected from any disaster.
However, in a new age of unprecedented change and complexity, this is easier said than done. Data is growing at an uncontrollable rate, whilst companies face significant infrastructural challenges. Silos and legacy systems are putting the brakes on their ability to properly manage data assets, innovate and deliver the experiences that today’s customers demand.
To kill this complexity, you need to abstract it using a data service fabric, a platform that provides all your data management needs and supports workloads on any platform and on any cloud.
The hardest part of AI and analytics is not AI, it’s data management
The age of complexity
The data that companies deal with on a day-to-day basis is growing exponentially. Indeed, it’s estimated that there will be 175 petabytes of data by 2025. To put that in perspective, there’s roughly three billion files in every petabyte of enterprise data.
The challenge, however, isn’t just how much data organisations are dealing with, but where it’s located. We’ve entered an age where data isn’t just stored in an on-site data centre, it’s in multiple cloud and on-premise locations. It’s simply beyond human capacity to manage all of this data in all of these overlapping environments.
When data becomes difficult to manage, it often goes dark. Dark data describes data that has been lost or forgotten, without an efficient way to tell what or where it is. Around 52% of all business data is estimated to be dark — unclassified, unknown and unprotected. When lost in the machine, data becomes vulnerable to not only human error, but also to crippling cyberattacks.
For organisations with unpatched systems and dark data, the threat of ransomware is very real. One can protect the perimeter of a company with all sorts of point solutions but, inevitably, the system will fail, and it only takes one failure to lose your mission-critical data to encryption. One suspect email link, clicked on in a moment of absent-mindedness by an employee, can jeopardise your entire organisation.
Meanwhile, data is steadily becoming more regulated, increasing the burden of compliance. GDPR is only the tip of the iceberg. Even if your data is sitting in the public cloud, it’s still your responsibility to manage it and keep it safe.
Yet many organisations still struggle with the basics: “how much data do I have?”, “where is it located?”, and “is it protected?” are common questions still asked today. How can businesses protect their data and comply with regulatory requirements when they don’t have these answers? It’s time for a new approach.
5 technology trends transforming data management
Rise above complexity
Instead of living with data complexity, companies should rise above it. To thrive competitively, they need to ensure their data is constantly available, protected regardless of where it sits, and full of valuable insight that can be easily extracted to meet business objectives.
You can try to deliver this by investing in various point solutions. However, by the time you’ve taken on a point solution for every aspect of data management, you’ll end up with hundreds of different tools. These tools won’t integrate or connect, and you can’t control them through a single pane of glass or roll out changes quickly across your enterprise. They’ll soon create an even bigger burden for employees and swiftly become redundant.
To overcome this challenge, businesses need to embrace the concept of abstraction – the process of managing complexity effectively. The objective should be to simplify all the functions of data management you constantly juggle with and try to automate them.
You start by centralising data management under one platform, capable of addressing your current needs but also your future ones. This platform should allow you to keep continuous visibility over the enterprise’s data, where it’s located and if it’s at risk. It should also be able to take on the day-to-day challenges of data management across all workload stacks you have, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud.
Through the platform, you will be able to automatically classify and tag your data and apply consistent management policies, allowing you to better understand your data. When an employee wants to find a specific piece of information they will immediately know where to look.
Veritas offers an Enterprise Data Services platform that deals with solving the complexity that arises from the ever-increasing growth of data and its dispersal across data centres and multiple clouds. The platform is a fabric that offers data management services from:
• NetBackup 8.2 — to ensure your most important workloads and data are backed up on premises and in any cloud, ready to be recovered when needed;
• InfoScale — to deliver data orchestration and monitor workloads for peak performance, ensuring availability of your applications and the data that powers them; and
• Information Studio — to analyse data, provide visibility and targeted insight to ensure you remain compliant.
One of our financial services customers was facing a perfect storm of complexity. A highly regulated environment, a heavily siloed IT system and the ever-present threat of cyber attack made delivering a fully real-time, digital banking experience a real challenge. Now with Veritas, it can protect all of its data with NetBackup and keep its critical business services resilient and available with InfoScale.
Insight is power: it allows enterprises to gain control of their data to manage its growth, reduce the impact of ransomware, and ensure compliance across their entire data estate. Confident in the knowledge that their most valuable digital asset is managed and protected, businesses can focus on deriving that value to improve customer experiences, while driving operational efficiency and new revenue streams in today’s competitive digital age.
Veritas is holding a Thought Leadership Breakfast Series for Women of Vision on Monday 9th March at the Duck and Waffle, 110 Bishopsgate, London, EC2N 4AY. For more information or to reserve your place, contact Jules.Wakefield@Veritas.com.
