A Guide to Understanding Market-Leading Data Storage Solutions

Uploaded on 2024-12-23 in TECHNOLOGY--Developments, FREE TO VIEW, BUSINESS-Services-IT & Telecoms

Often the most data rich modern organisations can be information poor. The gap emerges where businesses struggle to fully leverage data, especially where exponential data growth creates new challenges. Where a company is data ‘rich’, it will require robust, secure and efficient storage solutions to harness data to its fullest potential.

From advanced on-premises data centres to cloud storage, the evolution of data storage technologies is fundamental to managing the vast amounts of information that organisations depend on every day.

Storage For Today’s Landscape

In today’s climate of rigorous compliance and escalating cyber threats, operational resilience depends on strategies that combine data storage, effective backup and recovery, as well as cyber security. Storage solutions provide the foundation for managing vast amounts of data, but simply storing this data is not enough. Effective backup policies are essential to ensure that data can be quickly restored in the event of deliberate or accidental disruptions.

Regular backups, combined with redundancy measures, help to maintain data integrity and availability, minimising downtime and ensuring business continuity.

Cyber threats - such as hacking, malware, and ransomware - is an advancing front, posing new risks to businesses of all sizes. Whilst SMEs often find themselves targets, threat actors prioritise organisations most likely to suffer from downtime, where, for example, resources are limited, or there are cyber skills gaps. It has even been estimated that an alarmingly high as 60% of SMEs wind down their shutters just six months after a breach.

If operational resilience is on your business’ agenda, then rapid recoveries (from verified points of retore) can return a business to a viable state. The misconception, where attacks nowadays feel all too frequent, is that business recovery is a long, winding road. Yet, market-leading data storage options have evolved, like IBM FlashSystem, to address conversations around operational resilience in new, meaningful ways.

Storage Options

An ideal storage strategy should capture a means of managing data that organises storage resources into different tiers based on performance, cost, and access frequency. This approach ensures that data is stored in the most appropriate and cost-effective manner.

Storage fits within various categories, including hot storage, warm storage, cold storage, and archival storage - each with various benefits that organisations can leverage, be it performative gains, or long-term data compliance and retention. But organisations large and small must start to position storage as a strategic pillar in their journey to operational resilience – a critical part of modern parlance for businesses, enshrined by the likes of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).

By adopting a hierarchical storage strategy, organisations can optimise their storage infrastructure, balancing performance and cost. This approach not only enhances operational resilience by ensuring critical data is always accessible but also helps to effectively manage investment in storage.

Achieving Operational Resilience With Storage

1. Protection – a protective layer in storage means verifying and validating restore points to align with Recovery Point Objectives. After restoring operations, ‘clean’ backups ensure that malicious code is not reinserted into your systems.

2. Detection – does your storage solution help mitigate costly intrusions by detecting anomalies and thwarting malicious, early-hour threats? FlashSystem, for example, has inbuilt anomaly detection to prevent invasive threats breaching your IT environment. Think early, preventative strategies and what your storage can do for you.

3. Recovery – the final stage is all about minimising losses after impact, or downtime. This step addresses operational recovery, getting a minimum viable company back online. This works to the lowest possible Recovery Time Objectives.

Storage can be a matter of business survival. Cyber resilience, quick recovery and a robust storage strategy help circumvent the following:

Reduce inbound risks of cyber attacks.
Blunt the impact of breaches.
Ensure a business can remain operational.

A helpful exercise is to imagine whether or not a business can afford the costs associated with downtime from seven or more days after an attack occurs.

Advanced Data Security

Anomaly detection technology in modern storage systems offers significant benefits by proactively identifying and addressing irregularities in data patterns. This capability enhances system reliability and performance by detecting potential issues before they escalate into critical problems. By continuously monitoring data flows and usage patterns, the technology ensures optimal operation and reduces downtime.

But did you know market-leaders in storage, like IBM, have inbuilt, predictive analytics to ensure that even the most data rich companies remain informationally wealthy? This means system advisories with deep performance analysis can drive out anomalies, altering businesses about the state of their IT systems and the integrity of their data - from the point where it is being stored.

Selecting the appropriate storage solution ultimately enables you to develop a secure, efficient, and cost-effective data management strategy, boosting both your organisation’s and your customers’ operational resilience.

Given the inevitability of data breaches, investing in the right storage solutions is essential for protecting your organisation’s future. Storage conversations should add value to operational resilience, where market-leaders in this space are changing the game to favour your defence against cyber threats and risks of all varieties.

Billy Conway is Storage Development Executive at CSILtd

Image: Ideogram

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