The need to transform data protection in this age of information overload
As our shift into a digital economy continues to accelerate, companies must out-innovate, out-think and outpace their competition. There is a need to build innovative new applications that generate rich insights into your business, your industry and your customers which will enables you to make informed decisions and quickly take decisive action. This is the key to success for companies in the digital age.
Organisations are increasingly transforming and optimise IT by modernising infrastructure, automating the delivery and consumption of IT services and transforming operating methods they have in place today. IT Transformation helps to create a strong infrastructure foundation which helps in the delivery of automated services and cloud, automate and accelerate the deployment and delivery of IT services, reduce the risk of critical application and services deployment, optimise IT cost models and free up IT budget from operational expenses towards Digital Transformation.
Rising cybercrime and data breaches call for an urgent need for businesses to re-look their data protection applications. It is very crucial for Indian organisations to focus on not only data protection, but also data recovery.
Due to the shift to cloud and SDDC, data protection applications must also transform. It is necessary to align your data protection strategy with the needs of your rapidly changing business.
With the increasing prevalence of very large, fast-changing, virtualised mission-critical databases, traditional data protection approaches struggle to keep up. Application and data owners require speed and control to meet stringent Service Level Objectives (SLOs) for mission critical applications.
Here, automation of processes, modernisation of infrastructure, real time data analytics and optimisation play a crucial role. Things really begin to change when backup stops being a separate product, managed by a separate team, run in its own silo. Instead, data protection becomes a feature- an integrated part of the environment. In this new world, applications are deployed already protected. Backups and recoveries should be faster, streamlined, with minimal hardware footprint and a lower impact on the production environment.
Therefore, it is necessary for the Indian organisations to empower decision makers, with self-service and automation, giving access to IT governance and control. What organisations need to realise is that modern data protection designed for self-service requires intelligent, consolidated oversight of data and service levels across the business to ensure protection SLO compliance is met. It is essential that admins are allowed to maintain self-service by enabling storage administrators and DBAs to continue creating copies from their native interfaces instead of inserting a solution into the data path, and fully within the governance, SLOs and oversight of their IT data protection regime.
Modern data protection empowers application owners with the ability to use native tools within their applications and provides the control they desire, including the ability to set, monitor and enforce SLOs. By enabling cooperation and coordination between protection administrators and data owners, administrative overhead is reduced.
To conclude, Data Protection is an area ripe for reinvention and disruption and businesses need to realize the importance of transforming their traditional data protection applications to ensure protection against ever changing malwares. This will help them safeguard their data, to ensure no loss as well as ease of access to data.
—By Ripu Bajwa, Country Manager for Data Protection Solution, Dell EMC, India.
