IT security is an increasingly complex mission, especially after the turmoil of 2020. If your organization is like most, your workforce is likely still dispersed, your employees are utilizing their own devices to access the network, and your data is living in a growing number of locations, including the edge, private cloud, public cloud, and on-premises.
Keeping up with the latest advances in IT technology is a task in and of itself. Once you add implementation and administering each new solution, it can become overwhelming. However, despite the hassle of upgrading, it’s a necessary to ensure that each part of your IT infrastructure is performing as optimally as possible.
When it comes to pieces of the IT puzzle where skimping or going with the option that’s just ‘good enough’ will inevitably come back to haunt you, backup and disaster recovery tops the list.
The recent COVID-19 crisis is a prime example of why contingency plans are so critical in a world that seems increasingly vulnerable to disrupting events. It also shows just how little time you may have to implement a plan. In a world today that operates at the speed of digital on a normal day, even the best laid plans are hard to implement when everything is trending all at once. As Mike Tyson said, “Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Correlation may not equal causation, but the link IDC research draws between digital transformation and business success is a strong one. The digital transformation needed to support today’s dynamic business models include a host of new technologies: solid state storage, artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), software-defined infrastructure, and cloud, among others.
The driver that wins the big race does not get as much credit for the win if he simply drove the fastest car on the track. After all, logic says the driver should win. A recent trend in data storage has been to migrate to all flash array storage solutions. Flash drives are certainly faster than HDD disks. For those enterprises that implement AFA storage arrays, performance is definitely fast, which it should be using the logic of the fastest racecar. However, there are companies that are achieving ultrafast performance without having to pay the premium price for high performance storage media. Now that is real innovation.
In order to maintain a competitive edge, businesses need to be able to move fast, and recover faster. When your success depends on evaluating data in real-time, any kind of hiccup can cost you money. Today’s enterprises need more than backup – they need to be able to rapidly restore critical data in the right contexts. That’s why more and more frequently, disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T) architectures are giving way to faster, more efficient flash-to-flash-to-cloud (F2F2C) technologies.
Enterprises are increasingly realizing the value of their data, and are capturing as much of it as possible to glean whatever insights they can. The challenge, however, is that IT budgets are not growing at the rates needed to properly handle these growing mountains of digital gold.
In order for developers to keep up with the speed of business, new innovations in storage, backup, and disaster recovery are being rolled out at a breakneck pace. To stay competitive, enterprises must adopt these new methods and technologies for faster restores and greater opportunities to leverage the true value of data across their organization.
Digital transformation is reinventing the IT infrastructure. Enterprises are shifting to software-defined data centers and the new technology that comes with them. AI and machine learning (ML), cloud utilization, and software-defined storage are just a few of the many new tools that organizations now employ to help them harness the power of their data. As a result, IT infrastructure management has become increasingly complex. IT staff can no longer be expected to manage every part of the infrastructure. However, the answer to this issue is simple: let technology manage itself. AI/ML intelligent data platforms can provide comprehensive data management throughout the infrastructure.
