Amid the ongoing skills gap and the permanent shift to hybrid work, workloads continue to rise. Two and a half quintillion bytes of data are generated every day, often scattered across the cloud, data silos, and on-premises storage as employees work from multiple locations. While this flexible approach to work has many benefits—increased productivity, better employee well-being, and better work-life balance—it can also create data proliferation.
Left alone and unattended, workloads pile up and businesses must strike a balance to manage data stored in multiple locations. While this may be sustainable in the short term, it is not sustainable in the long term and will eventually spill over. Many will remember offices before the widespread use of computers and technology, when piles of paper were piled on desks and file cabinets were filled to the brim with important documents. Trying to find the single sheet of paper with the information I needed was a difficult task that wasted valuable time. Having a disparate IT environment has a similar impact on today's business operations.
Business agility is key to keeping up with the inevitable changes in your IT environment and making sure nothing goes wrong. To achieve this, data protection and availability are essential elements of any digital transformation process.
Note: - Get more information about how to manage your workloads admist on going change.
IT environments are never static: they are constantly changing, growing, and adapting to meet ever-changing business needs. A key element of these changes is the adoption of new technologies. New problems require new technologies to solve them. However, they are often installed without removing older technologies, creating an environment with infrastructure, workloads, and data types that span generations. This creates data silos as data becomes fragmented and isolated with old technology.
With their data scattered and separated, organizations end up in an unstable environment where data is not sufficiently protected. The proliferation of data creates gaps in your IT environment, and without a central platform to manage it, entry points are open to attackers. This leaves a risk of data loss and can create difficulties in recovering lost data.
Opt for all inclusive
The large-scale shift to SaaS and cloud-based applications over the past two years has been essential for business continuity, but has resulted in an increase in the number of organizations facing data sprawl. It's impossible to get the most out of your data when it's managed by different backup solutions and scattered across multiple environments. While each solution may seem simple and effective on its own, having a comprehensive solution will allow for better management and security of your data. You'll increase data visibility and IT productivity, while reducing the risk of exposure as the attack surface is reduced.
A checklist for success
Managing and protecting all the data stored in an organization under one roof has many benefits. Not only does this ensure complete data visibility and avoid data silos, but the ability to view and manage data through a single window increases productivity and accelerates business growth. Make sure your solution checks the following five boxes to manage ongoing change and future-proof your organization:
Diversity:
Because all organizations have multiple generations of data, your data management solution must be able to consolidate a diverse technology stack with unified protection and flexibility.
Flexibility:
Your IT environment will continue to evolve and change, so it's critical that your solution has the flexibility to grow and support the technologies you'll need in the future, as well as the ones you use today.
Security:
Being able to view your entire environment from one platform through a centralized security console will allow you to apply the required security to your data. This should provide compliance, replication, and disaster recovery reporting to ensure business continuity whether your data is in the cloud or on-premises.
Fast recovery:
Automatic disaster recovery is essential to quickly recover your data, should it be lost due to a cyber-attack or human error. Regularly testing your disaster recovery is also key to making sure your data can be recovered efficiently and effectively.
Simplicity:
A solution that uses data insights powered by AI and ML will improve connectivity and make more informed decisions, thereby providing opportunities for growth, leaving room for product development, and enabling better customer service.
A solution that meets these five criteria significantly reduces the complexity of an IT environment. A simplified, secure environment that actively manages data allows a business to focus on other priority areas, such as customer service, innovation, and product development. As an essential part of staying competitive, all organizations need to ensure their workload is on a solid foundation. Being agile and having instant data availability will help your business thrive in the long run, as you reap the benefits of a balanced and well-managed workload.
