Data Management, why do I need it??
Many organisations see data management as purely a backup option. The protection of data as the last line of defence when something is deleted, corrupted or, in more recent times, stolen through encryption.
When data becomes too overwhelming to manage from a DR and business continuity perspective, as well as shrinking storage budgets, IT are tasked to deploy a solution to address the issue. This inevitably becomes a new solution to manage, maintain and understand which is separate from the backup solution already in place, this isn’t necessarily addressed by buying a solution from the same vendor either.
On top of this, new regulations are putting increased pressure on IT departments to provide eDiscovery and search capabilities across the entire data estate for governance reasons, with the increased pressure of proving data has been deleted from the backups when they should be, is it safe to keep everything forever on backup anymore?
Now throw in the mobile workers and how the data on their laptops are protected and secured, and suddenly another solution is added to the mix. The increase in management and costs start to quickly scale.
Once you consider all this, data management no longer appears to be just about backing something up and restoring them. It is more about how the data is managed from the moment it is created through to the time it is deleted, whether that deletion is accidental, malicious or regulatory.
This management should be through a single pane of glass. Whether the requirement is to backup physical or virtual servers, integrate with storage arrays, protect Windows, Linux or Red Hat Operating Systems, manage Exchange, SQL or Oracle databases, provide unified search across unstructured data sets, or protect mobile devices to improve productivity. It needs to be the same repeatable interface and approach that has to be learnt once and not every time.
Extend this same single pane of glass approach to reduce the footprint of structured and unstructured data sets by archiving to cheaper slower storage, and without having to change the way the end user interacts with the information, then you have a powerful data management portfolio that can deliver business value and reduce expenditure.
There isn’t one toolset that can address all new regulatory guidelines, such as GDPR. But having an overarching policy-driven data management solution that can simply and easily report, search and enable legal hold, as well as quickly delete data based on global retention policies, is certainly providing a step in the right direction to ensure flexibility for the unknown.
Other benefits such as software-based deduplication, compression and replication go one step further by simplifying the management overhead of disparate solutions and preventing hardware vendor lock-in.
Viadex regularly assists our customers is providing data management solutions that go beyond simply backing up and restoring. Partnering with CommVault, Viadex is able to ensure businesses have the flexibility needed to adapt to the rapidly changing marketplace and the future of unknown challenges we all face.
To find out a little bit more about how we can provide you with data management solutions go to www.viadex.com
Author: Stuart Allen, Viadex Pre-Sales Infrastructure Architect
