Data protection in the modern enterprise is seeing fast-paced changes often requiring a new approach and strategy. For one thing, data availability is vital. It is fundamental to enabling the business analytics that are fueling more efficient and competitive modern enterprises. As we move towards a more regulated world, it is also necessary to remain compliant with data privacy regulations and eDiscovery requests. Data must also be protected from loss, disasters, and cyber-threats.
As a result, guaranteeing data access is more difficult than ever before. The volumes of data that must be protected are growing exponentially. This data lives across private, hybrid and multi-cloud storage architectures that leverage storage media like solid state drives (SSDs) and hard disk drives (HDDs), and access protocols like block, file, and object. Data also exists across a myriad of devices – mobile phones, personal computing devices, IoT, sensors etc.
Lastly, cyberattacks, such as ransomware, have not only become more common but also more sophisticated. No organization can allow themselves to not have a strategy in place in case they are a target.
Modern Data Protection Requires a New Approach
Today’s modern enterprise requires a revamped approach to data protection, an approach that includes:
1. Capitalizing on Object Storage
Modernized backup and archive/long-term retention storage infrastructure capitalizes on object storage. Object storage is inherently lower-cost and more scalable than traditional network-attached storage (NAS) implementations. In being metadata-rich, it also enables individual files to be more easily located, version history is tracked and it’s a superior choice for unstructured data such as image and video files, log files, emails, documents and the growing amount of machine and sensor-generated data.
Storage professionals should look for data integrity capabilities, such as durability via erasure coding and data integrity checks. They should look for the flexibility to be deployed either on or off-premises, or in the hybrid cloud to address a myriad of cost, backup and recovery performance, and compliance requirements.
2. Unified and Automated Management and Protection of Data
Notably, data should be tiered intelligently and transparently across primary to secondary storage infrastructure resources, according to data access and retention requirements. Data should be able to be tiered across on-premises and off-premises storage types alike, including from a higher-cost to a lower-cost cloud storage service.
This can help to streamline daily management duties for IT professionals and to make sure that data is on the most cost-appropriate tier of storage. It can also help the enterprise to be more confident in knowing that data retention requirements – whether for business purposes such as analytics, regulatory requirements, or eDiscovery purposes – are met. Furthermore, it can help data to be more quickly recalled as needed.
3. Minimal Opportunity for Data Loss
Telemetry and analytics-driven insights into how storage systems are functioning are critical. This allows organizations to mitigate potential system failures by identifying and resolving potential problems before they impact production operations. IT teams need comprehensive analytics to maximize the uptime and efficiency of their infrastructure and save time on storage administration through proactive management.
4. Smart Recovery
In addition, when it comes to leveraging the cloud specifically, IT professionals should look for the ability to recover data on or off-premises, and to harness cost-effective and scalable compute cycles for capabilities such as index management and search.
Modern Data Protection and the Modern Enterprise
Modern data protection is indeed changing, and enterprises are faced with a number of options that can help to meet data availability requirements. Data needs to be on the right storage tier at the right time, to meet access requests without breaking the bank.
Originally published on Western Digital’s Blog, September 10, 2019, by Victor Nemechek
