Friday, November 17, 2017

The Changing Nature of Data Protection in Today’s Business World

By: Chris West   Categories:Data Protection

The Changing Nature of Data Protection in Today’s Business World
Data solutions are at the core of our business at Sentia. This provides us a front row seat to help our customers with the increasing challenges in keeping growing amounts of data secured and protected. A tremendous amount of pressure is being put on businesses to store more information, have it easily accessible and agile across diverse environments.

Here are a few tips to stay on top of changing trends and requirements to help you make the most of your IT investment. At the very top of your strategy list, you need to take a holistic approach and start by simplifying your complex IT environment to make it easier to manage and help you reduce costs.

The resources you will effectively free up can then be reallocated to innovative solutions such as digital transformation and IoT - two major concepts that illiustrate what the future of IT looks like.

Simplify Your Complex IT Environment
To reduce the cost and complexity of your IT environment, you’ll need to eliminate manual scripting and processes. By automating the tasks that discover, deploy and protect your environment from within, you will also benefit from leveraging policy-based data protection and management.

Empower Your IT Environment and Address High Data Growth
IDC has presented numerous papers indicating how fast data is growing. With the IoT, all this information from multiple platforms needs to be stored. Data is doubling every two years. Many businesses are also impacted by massive workloads of VMs and mission critical databases that still reside on physical servers.

You can start by taking these steps to manage data growth by first leveraging integrated de-duplication from the source to an integrated backup appliance. This will help you reduce the time it takes to do your backups and network loads. It will also reduce your storage footprint and optimize replication so you can execute a more efficient and cost effective disaster recovery.

Then, you’ll need a solution to provide you the insights and the ability to visualize where you have data hot spots if you don’t already have one. You need to be in a position to make decisions and manage you data wherever it is located in a proactive way so that you can reduce risks and possibly storage costs.

Performance is the next area you should address. Slow performance is often associated with data growth. If your data protection plan was designed to scale for the next three to five years and include the tools to meet your workload requirements, you should be in good shape.

Leverage the Hybrid Cloud
The Hybrid cloud offers great flexibility and the ability to use new hardware, software and services when and where you need them. There is also a cost benefit of paying only for what you consume, and reducing the need to purchase additional hardware for temporary surges in demand. However, you still need to use best-in-class hardware, software and services that will provide the best fit for your requirements. Data protection in this case is an important consideration. The tools we spoke of earlier to manage data wherever it resides is key here.

Unleash a New Approach to IT with an “As-a-Service” Organization
Organizations today look to on-demand services and technologies to innovate and provide more value to the business. Moving to an “IT-as-a-service” model for data protection will empower internal and external customers and relieve the backup admin for many issues that users can resolve on their own. With policy-based access to flexible and streamlined ‘self-service’ backup and recovery, IT resources will gain productivity.

Snapshot Management Simplified
Key components of your data protection strategy should include easy snapshot and replication management. This will help you manage progressively tighter backup and recovery SLAs. Look for integration solutions that let you easily automate, and replicate both on and off-premises.

Plan for the future with Digital Transformation
Digital transformation will also impact in a very positive way your data protection initiatives. With a well designed data protection strategy, unifying and consolidating backup and recovery across physical, virtual, and cloud workloads, will be at your fingertips.
Resources and information

Industry Insight: The Evaluator Group: Why Data Protection is Changing
Download the Report

At Sentia, we are solutions experts that can help you determine the best strategy for your business to stay in control of your data management needs. Feel free to reach out to us with any additional questions. We’re here to help.

Upcoming Event Announcement
For those in the SWO area, we are holding a Storage event on December 1st with IBM at the luxurious Langdon Hall Hotel in Cambridge. The discussion will center around the latest trends in Storage and important information on protecting your investment now for the future. 

If you are able to attend, please do so by registering here. 

Roger Osmond
President, Sentia

Chris West
Chris West

Chris West

Chris has always taken a “customer-first” approach in building productive relationships with customers, partners and colleagues. With over 18 years of experience in a variety of sales, business development and customer facing roles, including IBM Canada and Lenovo, Chris brings extensive knowledge and experience to Sentia.

Other posts by Chris West
Contact author Full biography

Full biography

Chris has always taken a “customer-first” approach in building productive relationships with customers, partners and colleagues. With over 18 years of experience in a variety of sales, business development and customer facing roles, including IBM Canada and Lenovo, Chris brings extensive knowledge and experience to Sentia. Chris holds a BA in Administration with a speciality in Accounting and Human Resources from Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and an Accounting and Finance diploma from Seneca College in Toronto.

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