Every enterprise is trying to determine how to manage more data growth without scaling budget or staff as well.
Henry Baltazar, an analyst from 451 Research, said in a recent report :
The increasing relevancy of data management is in parallel with the ongoing growth of the sheer volume of data that enterprises must deal with.
The good news is that there are many approaches IT can take to ease the challenges of data growth.
Let's take a look at the 4 steps, IT can use to simplify data management and to make a big impact in their organisation :
- Gain visibility
- Integrate assets
- Add cloud or object storage as new storage tier
- Automate intelligent data management
Gain visibility
It might seem obvious, but you can’t fix the problems you ignore. This makes it critical to gain the visibility your business needs. In fact, your organization doesn't know :
- what kind of data are Hot and require to have the best performance storage.
- what data is Cold and can be moved to a less costly storage resource.
Experts like IDC explain that over 80% of the data are unstructured, and most of our storage systems were not designed for the various of data. More and more business company make mistake in their process of storage management because they storing, replicating and protecting ALL THEIR DATA on expensive primary storage.
If you have the visibility of the data usage, you can better manage your unstructured data. Move, copy or replicate the right data to the best system. Why ? Because it's important to control the life cycle of your data, with visibility and reporting. You are sure to take the right decision for your business because your organisation is unique.
You can now easily understand what are the actions you have to do :
- Place the Hottest data on the fastest storage.
- Move faster the data that you don't use on secondary storages.
- Place the data you want to share with differents branch, colleagues... on cloud storage.
Software can now deliver this insight, using metadata to determine when files were last opened, by whom, when they were last changed, and so on.
Solutions with dashboards give you a clear picture of aggregated data activity across your storage systems.
Integrate your assets
Most terabyte/petabyte-scale enterprises have significant storage sprawl. Just count how many different storage systems you have. The challenge is that over time, the difficulty of moving data means much of it is on the wrong resource for current business needs.
Add cloud or object storage
There are few better options for saving budget today than adding on-premises object or cloud storage. The challenge is how to integrate the cloud as a storage tier and move the right data off other storage. Data virtualization, metadata management and machine learning can all help make this a simple and automated process. As data gets cold, end-user can have it move off high-cost storage, but kept accessible in case it is needed again.
When adding the cloud, it’s important to make sure data moved off-premises can seamlessly move back at the file level. If you are forced to rehydrate an entire volume from the cloud, you could end up paying much more than you bargained for. This is because it is generally inexpensive to move data to the cloud, but very costly to bring it back again. Making sure you can pull back data at file-level granularity will help you keep costs low while enjoying the flexibility and agility that is driving rapid cloud adoption in the enterprise.
Automate intelligent management
Once you’ve gained insight into your data and given your applications awareness to your diverse storage resources, the final step is to automate the data management.
Today software provides these capabilities ; metadata engine and machine learning automate data management according to IT/business defined objectives even across different hardware vendors.
We met IT departments which aren't getting more budget or more headcount to help them deal with data growth, visibility, integration, cloud adoption, and automation. The IT staff challenge is to manage strategic projects instead of spending their days working as storage manager.
It's essential today for all enterprises to add these capabilities if they want to scale and to meet their challenges. The data are used by businesses as a tool that helps them lead their industries.