Cost efficiency, automation, and cloud integration are the three main factors that affect data management in today's digital world. With the growing amount of data that businesses need to trawl through, business leaders need to be cognisant of the factors that affect data management decisions. Coupled with performance and non-disruptive operations, these factors will ultimately prove the true benefits of efficient data management.
This is according to Sekete Patrick Maphopha, NetApp Africa CTO and technology evangelist, who explains more South African business leaders should consider the prospects of shifting away from traditional legacy systems towards more efficient data management tools such as the cloud. A major reason behind this, he adds, is to gain always-on reliability and a central point where data can be accessed from anywhere at any time.
"Businesses today demand unprecedented availability for modern data centres. Reliable backups and fast recovery are just a small portion of the big picture. IT professionals require application-consistent backups across multiple platforms.
"South African data management systems have been long-built on outdated legacy systems, such as backup tapes. A big reason why this has not shifted has been partly due to perceptions around costs, integration, and performance; however SA may soon reach a tipping point when compatibility issues start to arise. Enter the option of flash storage," Maphopha points out.
According to the sixth annual Cisco Global Cloud Index , the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region is expected to see an exponential growth in data centre traffic, spurred by organisations' rapid migration to cloud architectures. The report notes that globally, cloud traffic is expected to rise 3.7-fold, up from 3.9 zettabytes (ZB) per year in 2015 to 14.1ZB per year by 2020.
"The IT industry has taken cloud computing from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible networking solution," says Andy MacDonald, VP for global service providers for MEA and Russia at Cisco.
"With large global cloud deployments, operators are optimising their data centre strategies to meet the growing needs of businesses and consumers. In the six years of this study, cloud computing has advanced from an emerging technology to an essential scalable and flexible part of architecture for service providers."
Mike Rees, Commvault territory account manager for SA, says data is growing at an exponential rate and this is adding complexity on how organisations should best manage their data traffic.
"Digitisation has resulted in more data being generated and it needs to be stored somewhere. Digitised environments enable people to have better access to information - they are now able to access data from multiple devices, and they are also able to store information on their phones, in the cloud, on the laptop, PC or on their tablet. This creates complexity as compliance has become a key consideration. There are several legislations that exist, including imminent ones such as POPI that require data to be secure, private and stored for a certain period. Data management has transformed to cater to this shift in how and where data is stored and for how long," he notes.
Faced with rapidly growing data volumes, he adds, it is easy for organisations to simply procure more storage capacity. However, without some form of intelligence behind data management, this 'keep everything' approach can become an expensive business liability.
"In order to drive value from data, it is essential for organisations to understand what they are storing, where and why, as well as which information is mission critical, confidential, or generates business value. This in turn means that enterprises can ensure their data is stored in the most appropriate and cost-effective manner according to data relevance, importance, age and various other criteria.
"Achieving this requires effective data management, which in turn requires organisations to break down the siloes between business and IT as well as between the various different storage architectures," Rees explains.
Over the past few decades, data management, he continues, has evolved to meet the needs of digital business as more intelligent ways of managing information emerge.
"Catalogues can now assist organisations to search and retrieve specific information and nowadays, these catalogues can also be backed up. In the advent of digital transformation, we are also seeing companies migrate components of their infrastructure, applications, and more to the cloud to create a more agile, flexible enterprise. Information management must now be able to back up data across multiple platforms including the variety of cloud models and on premise infrastructure," he concludes.
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