Evolution of digital data protection & management

BANGALORE, INDIA: The role of a computer has been evolving over the years and digital storage technology has kept up pace. Computers were used mainly for specific and niche areas in 60s and 70s like scientific research, space programs, etc.

Advent of mainframe computers saw large corporate houses leveraging computers in 70s and 80s. Personal computer introduction during mid 80s started widespread adoption of computer by variety of organizations. Over time computer became an integrated part not only with business but also on personal front at most of the homes.

Internet enhanced relevance of computer to people of all age group. Digital content generation picked-up dramatic pace with mobile taking over from desktop/laptop as the end point device. Digital content generated till 2005 got doubled in the next five years and this timeline is further shrinking. Cloud computing is further enhancing relevance and applicability of computing to even large section of business and individuals.

For both organizations and individuals, assets in the current time are mainly in digital form. For organizations to grow in these competitive times, key business differentiators need to be identified and protected from both internal and external threats to ensure continued profitable growth.

In a connected world with high dependence on internet the business is also exposed to various risks. Data loss due to human error, natural disaster like flooding, earthquake etc are being seen at more frequent pace off late. Global economic challenges have made threats evolve from nuisance value to financial exploits.

We see more and more focused activity for financial gains across business and consumer space. Financial loss due to exploitations has grown so fast that they are larger than drug trafficking industry as per one of the recent study. Continued challenges on economic front in the developed markets will fasten this rate moving forward.

Developing nations like India also face challenge caused due to high attrition of manpower which also needs to be take care in the asset protection and management perspective for business across size and vertical. It is critical to note that 30 per cent of organizations impacted due to 9/11 which lost all its data could not make a comeback post the event.

Business continuity and Digital data protection and availability hence are of paramount importance.

Direct attached storage was the most basic form of storage. Since DAS was server specific, in order to enhance utilization SAN and NAS concepts evolved so that storage was scalable and flexible. RPO/RTO were the two factors used to determine to type and level of back-up for a given need based on the criticality. Archival for long term storage evolved driven by compliance.

Back-up window became a deciding factor on the type of storage and volume of data. With enterprise applications such as ERP/CRM/SCM high availability (HA), replication and disaster recovery (DR) started becoming the norm. Online applications popularity moved the market to business continuity.

With data volume doubling every year, de-duplication solutions became relevant and popular.

The biggest challenge on storage front for CIO across business sizes are

• Data doubles every year but IT budget grows around 15% only
• Data management infrastructure has become very complex over time since more and more disks were bought to manage the data growth
• No of individual products , licensing and compatibility issues have grown out of proportion
• Backup window has become difficult to manage
• De-duplication required at multiple levels - source, destination, etc
• DR is difficult to manage to ensure backup site comes up when actual disaster strikes due to continuous changes across application, hardware, software, etc

- Compliance requires data retention for long periods of time - managing tapes may not be practical for large data size like MNC banks.

 

Storage virtualization with single instancing is the latest in this trend to address majority of the above CIO challenges on storage front. Single instance dramatically reduces the data volume by over 90 per cent and also ensures data growth is kept within manageable limits moving forward thus reducing the need dramatically on the primary storage front.

Data protection and management activities like back-up, DR, HA, Archival, replication across WAN, data compression and acceleration across WAN, etc. can all be managed with a single product & license saving complexity, cost and manageability issues too. In addition this technology offers instantaneous backup/retrieval with zero backup window as icing on the cake.

The author is co-founder and managing director at iValue InfoSolutions.