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The Value of “Going Deep” With Your Storage

We are living in an era of unparalleled data growth. By the year 2025 the global datasphere will reach a trillion gigabytes—10 times the 16.1 zettabytes generated in 2016, according to IDC. This explosion of data is changing how we live our lives and how we run our businesses.

For business and IT managers, the pressure is on to leverage as much data as strategically possible to drive innovation and competitive business advantage. At the same time, however, business and IT leaders must also develop strategies to cost efficiently store, back up, safeguard and protect data from theft, misuse or attack.

If data is the primary currency of today’s business era, how do you ensure that your company is ahead of the curve in in managing, protecting and securing it? Here are three steps to consider:

  1. Deploy a comprehensive end-to-end data management strategy and platform that spans your entire enterprise. This will give you a roadmap to make your key decisions as to where to store your data, how to store it and how to protect it, secure it, preserve it and access it to address business requirements.
  2. Ensure that your end-to-end data management platform is not only comprehensive but also leverages cloud computing. The cloud provides organizations with tremendous flexibility in data management and storage. With the right cloud data management platform you can avoid data silos; eliminate data sprawl; leverage automation to support consistent security and policies, and use various storage types—such as on-demand block and object storage—to support different workloads and applications.
  3. Make sure that your end-to-end data management platform allows you to “go deep” with your data. This means working with a provider that gives you the flexibility to use every data type or media necessary to enable end-to-end data management capabilities that include backup, archive, recovery from disruption, and deep storage to tape media.

Why Deep Storage?
The idea behind deep storage is to have a reliable, inexpensive and accessible safety net for your data that is not at risk from cyberattack, natural disasters or other events that could compromise your data and your business.

This additional storage tier would typically be tape media stored in a secure offsite vault managed by a company that specializes in data custodianship. If you think about data as the lifeblood of your business, why wouldn’t you work with a provider that at the very least offers you the option of this level of protection?

   

Among the advantages of leveraging deep storage are:

  • A Safety Net: Deep storage is just one medium for backup and storage as part of a broader data management and protection strategy. In addition to deep storage for backup and/or archives, you would also have a separate tier for these same functions that would be either on disk or in the cloud for faster access and availability.
  • Cost Efficiencies: Compared to other storage media for backup and archiving, deep storage is much less expensive. And, by leveraging the resources of a third-party provider as part of a broader data management platform, you don’t have to tax your existing IT teams and resources for operations or management.
  • Ransomware Protection: Deep storage provides an important incremental level of security protection, particularly against ransomware attacks. Deep storage enables you to follow 3-2-1 best practices in data protection, giving you an offline gold copy of your data that you can use to restore data rather than pay a ransom.

Conclusion
There’s so much discussion these days around data and its role in changing businesses through digital transformation, big data analytics, the Internet of Things, social media and machine learning. It is hard to argue with the often-articulated idea that data is your greatest asset. If that is the case, it is important to treat it that way. This means taking the steps necessary to empower end-to-end data management and leverage all means at your disposal to “go deep” with data security, protection and recovery from disruption.

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