This Valentine’s Day, it’s time to give big data more love, and here’s why: big data contributes to business value, but right now, could you give a summary of the big data protection and recovery plan you have in place?

More often than not, businesses assume big data sets are getting the backup and recovery attention they deserve. But, they’re probably not.

While ‘regular’ sized data sets have enjoyed feature-rich protection solutions, big data, to date, has not been given the same level of support.

It’s like saying an individual really likes a speedy sports car, but their only making oil changes when they get around to it – someone loves their partner, but they haven’t told them lately, or bought flowers this Valentine’s Day.

>See also: Big data vs. privacy: the big balancing act

Unlike, a partner – who may be forgiving – a casual approach to big data puts the organisation at risk of failing to meet compliance and governance regulations.

As large data sets increasingly become an integral part of an organisation’s information and knowledge base, and therefore subject to governance, there is more pressure on IT to ensure the data is searchable and that recovery point objectives are met.

Organisations need a protection solution that is big data ‘aware’ so that automated disaster recovery and enhanced levels of visibility are achieved for leading bg data platforms such as Hadoop, Greenplum and GPFS.

Deploying an effective protection and recovery solution for such large data sets has been a challenge for IT, which must balance this need against the expectation that costs will be reasonably contained. As businesses consider how to improve your big data protection, here are a few key items to ponder.

Can’t tie it up in a bow

Big data is growing and the aspect that IT fears most is unstructured data. All those Twitter feeds, Facebook posts and images, and video clips – this type of data shows no signs of slowing down.

In fact, IDC estimates unstructured data to rise from 9.3 zettabytes in 2015 to 44.1 zettabytes by 2020.

Since some of this data has value for customer insights, it does need protection. However, industry surveys show that organisations are identifying unstructured data as a secondary concern and are pretty nonchalant about their future plans for protection.

One big [data] security umbrella

Big data sets are part of the larger mix of data in an organisation. There is also structured data and analytic data. To avoid this turning into a multi-structured mess, IT needs to look at a converged, integrated backup and archive process to ensure that all types of data can be recovered, and discovered, to meet compliance and governance demands.

Putting the puzzle pieces back together

Bi data sets are often organised into multi-nodes, creating another security puzzle for IT to solve. The solution lies in software that can automate disaster recovery for multi-node systems.

>See also: Big data vs. the Internet of Things: how the projects differ

A single user interface can also help simplify security. IT can set rules and policies across environments, including Big Data, making recovery more efficient and costs are more controlled.

This environment flexibility is imperative since large data sets may reside in the cloud, on-premises or in a virtual repository.

Big data continues to expand. Forrester predicts the global big data management solutions market to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.8 percent from 2016 to 2021.

The analyst firm makes a strong statement that traditional data processing applications are inadequate.

IDC has also supported this notion. In a report published in 2016, IDC found that simplifying and consolidating a data management solution could result in huge benefits.

By using a centralised data platform, businesses can reduce the amount of storage and data management hardware required by 42%, reduce the amount of data protection and data management software required by 52% and most importantly, could reduce unplanned downtime by as much as 55% – saving both time and money.

>See also: 10 predictions for the Internet of Things and big data in 2017

These large data sets are gaining in importance and have catapulted data analytics into another dimension of complexity and scale.

The best way to care for big data this Valentine’s Day, is to incorporate it into an overall holistic data management plan and give it the attention it deserves.

By choosing a protection and recovery solution that can deal with every data type, businesses can easily handle this level of complexity. This will also deliver the level of compliance and governance security organisations need, all while getting the most from its data.

 
Sourced by Bill Wohl, chief communications officer, Commvault