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Redstor's Danie Marais unveils company's AI positioning at Gartner

Company's director of product management engages delegates at 2018 Gartner Symposium and emphasises the evolution of data management.


Johannesburg, 03 Oct 2018
Danie Marais, Director of Product Management at Redstor.
Danie Marais, Director of Product Management at Redstor.

Danie Marais, Director of Product Management at global data management SaaS specialist Redstor, says businesses have an opportunity to tap into the evolution of data management and take advantage of solutions that are being developed for artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, machine learning and the cloud.

Delegates who visited the 2018 Gartner Symposium in Cape Town in mid-September were guided by Marais and the rest of the Redstor team through the realities of bringing consumer-grade user experience into the boardroom, reducing the cost of data management and applying AI to enhance the value of data.

As a forward-looking software developer, Redstor has incorporated the future of data and AI-driven commerce into its development cycle.

Marais' presentation covered the entire life cycle of data, including tiering, relevant costs and predictions as to how this may change in future.

Redstor used the opportunity to emphasise the cost of bringing a consumer-grade user experience in the boardroom and introducing relevant features (based on the perception of having implemented one technology only to have to reinvest in another for long-term retention).

"What is driving this? Well, different people want different access...in a market dogged by cyber security threats like ransomware, consumers still want the same user experience at a company that they enjoy in their private capacity," said Marais.

"Some companies have already started moving towards customer grade user experiences by using things like NetApp where they have replication technologies built in, replicating their data in real-time to another storage system, sending snapshots that they can roll back to and instantly fire up when needing a restore. But this comes at a cost and that remains a huge challenge in most boardrooms."

According to Redstor, few businesses realise they can achieve their data management goals without compromising on agility... backup, recovery, archiving, migration and DR can be managed through a single Web-based control centre, empowering IT departments while reducing costs, simplifying deployment and billing, improving security and compliance and providing borderless visibility of your entire data estate.

Why settle for anything less?

Life cycle of data

Marais underlined the relevance of the life cycle of data.

Along with key themes of driving performance while reducing spend, how data tiering impacts cost optimisation and cloud integration, Marais said for businesses that rely on data, reducing the costs associated with processing and managing can be a quick win.

"We are talking about reducing IT management overheads, storage costs and improving reliability as well as compliance. Business benefit from centralised visibility and improved data accessibility for users... sweat storage assets for longer," said Marais.

Using AI to strengthen data value

AI is now a pervasive trend in the market. Analytics tools can provide insight where data sits on a network and how it can be managed more efficiently.

Redstor believes AI will bring the ability for technology to investigate data, in all of the different silos it resides:

* Working out how important that data is to your business;
* How frequently it's accessed;
* If it's high risk data or not;
* Who are the users involved with the data;
* Where it's being used; and
* Making your IT manager's job two to three times easier by letting data management technology of the future take over the responsibility.

Another reality of the data-centric market is that it demands agility to be able to keep up.

"Technology is changing so regularly and the bigger players might struggle to move their direction with legacy code; they are essentially too big to make speedy changes that scale. It takes years for them to change their culture, train sales and pre-sales, and bring new technologies to market. The difference that a smaller, focused service provider (like Redstor) makes, is that it is positioned at the forefront of innovation, it listens to customer feedback and the business is just the right size to manoeuvre easily while delivering monthly releases to its customers!" Marais explained

The company used the Gartner forum to showcase its dynamic data management strategy, and looks forward to replicating this at the upcoming Gartner symposium in Barcelona later this year.

The future of data management. Now.

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Redstor

Business downtime is over! So too, are high storage costs, siloed data, and difficult access. Redstor is disrupting the norm and changing everything you know about data storage, backup and recovery. Its pioneering technology is the first of its kind and provides you with on-demand access to your data from a single control centre (on any device). Simply stream your data in real-time and eradicate business downtime... forever.

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