Data storage, an unending organizational demur

MUMBAI, INDIA: Today with organizations and businesses getting IT enabled with automation, there's an incessant data generations of all types and sizes.

These data varies from highly confidential and classified information such as company's top notch IP (intellectual property) to general information shared and exchanged on daily basis among the staff, which are more of duplicated data.

Further, there's constant flow of emails and attachments on daily basis that is part of data generated. Also the staffs' personal data stored on the systems adds to the organizational data. It all adds to the organization's operational cost as well.

Mainly data consists of three parts - structured, semi-structured and unstructured. The storing of data needs storage space with other IT devices and applications for quick information access and sharing.

It includes SAN (storage area networks), email servers and networkings,Internet, NAS (network attached storage), data management solutions, back-up and recovery applications and data centers along with virtualization platform. All are quiet essentials storage needs for organizations but involves huge cost.

In the current downturn with low IT budgets, investment in storage remains debatable. Many IT experts view that investment in storage is significant for organizations irrespective of boom or slowdown.

According to Par Botes, EMC's CTO of Asia Pacific/Japan, organizations need to follow the information life cycle management while dealing with data and also strictly work on tiering model for differentiating the data and its criticality.

Tiering model is data classification method based on information criticality, value and its application.

“For a CIO, it's a tough task to deal with the data storage because there's the form of structured data that grows constantly which are the emails and attachments, consuming server spaces, bandwidths, which is bit expensive. Structured data include large-size copied and duplicated information that is shared within the company regularly,” says Botes.

“The unstructured is more of personal data of individuals in organization, which is mostly invisible and unseen, as it is spread out at various areas within the organization,” he adds.

“It appears like a white elephant existing within the organization, where the focus is more on the structured data. However, both the structured and unstructured needs a better look from the organization.”

Botes points that normally about 30 per cent is structured data, while 70 per cent is unstructured data which consumes lots of storage and energy in the data centers.

He suggests that data storage management issues in any organization needs a long-term, well-defined strategy keeping in view the criticality and data type - structured or unstructured, copied or duplicated and its needs.

“A single kind of technology is not the solution to the problem but it needs a close data assessment, defining its criticality and timely requirements,” he views.

Botes advices that structured data, which is highly critical and involves risk, should be backed by data protection and risk management technology.

Similarly, for the structured data, which is more of in duplicated form of smaller size, should use unified storage system along with Data Deduplication technology.

EMC, the global leading information storage systems and solution provider, apart from enterprises storage systems and solutions also has on-demand and software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for data back-up, email storage, infrastructure and data management and other services.