Johannesburg, 08 Jul 2015
Big data is the current buzzword in business, highlighting the mind-boggling amount of information produced on a daily basis and the associated promise of greater customer insights. But managing this wealth of information comes with a unique set of challenges: not least of which how to store and manage this data.
UCS Solutions' Executive for Technical Applications and Development, Eugene van der Merwe, was recently asked to share key insights about data protection in Africa's retail industry at IBM's Inter-Connect 2015, a premier cloud and mobile conference held in Las Vegas, Nevada, USA. Along with founder and CEO of information management firm iSanity, Heinrich Venter, Van der Merwe outlined how UCS Solutions managed to achieve an almost 100% daily backup success rate for a number of large African retailers, using reliable IBM systems.
By outsourcing the management of data protection systems to UCS Solutions, Van der Merwe explains that local retailers have the benefit of a team of experts handling the back-up and recovery of data. "The success rate is uniquely reliable," says Van der Merwe.
This is particularly significant in the African retail sector, which faces some unique and serious challenges, including 24/7 operations with only quarterly maintenance windows and severe skills shortages that affect delivery teams' ability to stabilise the data protection environment. Legislative data retention policies have also increase the volume of data needing to be managed. Furthermore, low success rates achieved by many backup systems have, over time, resulted in loss of consumer confidence.
But systems like those of UCS Solutions offer a simple and effective answer to these problems. Van der Merwe explains: "The long and the short of it is that back-up and recovery systems that protect customers and retailer system data are available."
UCS Solutions' offering, for example, includes a forecasting service to retailers that operate 24/7 which is based on restoring and recovering data dependent on stock control and stock movement at any point in time, says Van der Merwe. "When there is a point of failure in the system, you normally have to re-enter data but with our system there is no need to do that. This is huge for time recovery as well as resources."
For any retailer, the process towards optimisation is a journey which must strategically align with the company's continued evolution and growth. UCS Solutions partners with clients, providing guidance and support through the supply chain optimisation process. The outcome is a practical and sustainable model.
Van der Merwe admits that data backup and recovery systems are often a 'grudge purchase' for retailers but by selecting a product that is ahead of the curve in terms of implementation retailers can "leverage costs and efficiencies and hand over the management of a maturing backup service model that is reliable and cost effective".
Without a doubt, the phenomenal growth in data is impacting how IT departments choose to protect these increased volumes and, already, the wealth of information to be stored and processed has IT organisations at their tipping points. The situation will only continue to snowball according to research from IDC Digital Universe which indicates that, over the next decade, "the number of servers (virtual and physical) worldwide will grow by a factor of 10, the amount of information managed by enterprise datacenters will grow by a factor of 50, and the number of files the datacenter will have to deal with will grow by a factor of 75, at least. Meanwhile, the number of IT professionals in the world will grow by less than a factor of 1.5."
Retailers, businesses and IT specialists must, therefore, start to 'rethink' data protection today and find the balance between serving the organisation's desire for big data, seeking more value from the information they create, and the essential requirement of protecting information from a disaster, corruption, human error or a physical system failure.
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