Johannesburg, 12 Sep 2017
Predictions of data growth are rarely accurate. It's more of an explosion, with facts far outpacing forecasts. Having said that, IDC predicts that digital data will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42% through 2020 to an estimated 44 zettabytes.
This data has to be stored somewhere, it has to be retrievable in case of a disaster of any kind, and it needs to be analysed. But how do you plan ahead for an unknown quantity of data that keeps growing and changing?
Michael Jackson, one of the speakers at VeeamON Forum, held in Johannesburg in August, put data growth into perspective by taking attendees back to 1969, when man landed on the moon for the first time on 20 July. "This was the biggest single feat of engineering ever, yet the super computer installed at Cape Canaveral in Florida at the time, had six megabytes of storage. The spaceship itself, Apollo 11, only had 64 kilobytes on board."
The growth in mobile phones has been explosive. First introduced in the 1980s, by 1989 there were five million mobile phones, today there are an estimated seven billion in the world. Ten years ago, Facebook had 100 million users. Today, 1,2 billion people use the social media platform daily. It's easy to see how data volumes are growing. We're living in a one click world of always-on availability. This is changing the business formula for success, says Jackson. "Innovation that used to take a generation to occur is now happening in the space of weeks or months. The world is transforming around us."
Hamman Ferreira, the Chief Technology Officer of BankservAfrica, knows better than most the importance of 24/7/365 availability. The payment clearing house processes 200 million transactions a month and the service has to be seamless. "Someone swipes their card, the transaction has to go through immediately. We need to be able to cater for huge volumes of rich data, which places increased demand on storage and backup."
The other challenge faced by businesses is that data rarely moves in a consistent flow, there are usually peaks and troughs. In BankservAfrica's case, there's the need to cater for fluctuating workflow at the end and beginning of every month while still being able to carry out routine maintenance and administrative tasks. Then there are trends such as seasonal spending spikes, which have to be tracked and prepared for.
Ferreira says: "Over and above being able to accommodate busier periods, the resulting data must be analysed to detect patterns of who is spending their money where. Big data analytics is essential in this constant evolution of data as a new currency."
Mike Resseler, the Director of Product Management at Veeam, talks about where IT is heading in the next five years. He says: "What does always-on mean? It's about business continuity, you need to recover your data whenever you want. Failures will continue to happen, but you need to be able to recover with fewer failures and faster. Businesses want their cloud, their way, together with the ability to move data from wherever to wherever they want. Then they need visibility and analytics around their data, it's not enough to just store it. Businesses need to monitor their data, analyse it and then act based on the data available."
He says despite increasing adoption of the cloud, there will still be a need for physical servers in five years' time. "We'll still have legacy applications that require a physical server, the bottom line is businesses need to be able to restore their backup to wherever they want and to a specific point in time. So in the event of a malware attack, you can identify when the attack took place and restore to just prior to it. Flexibility is a non-negotiable."
Today's businesses need continuous data protection. Resseler refers to the concept of Tape as a Service, being offered as part of Data Recovery as a Service, which is gaining in popularity in Europe. It assists businesses to follow the 3-2-1 rule of backup, whereby they're advised to have three backup copies, across two different media types, one of which is stored offsite.
Claude Schuck, regional manager for Africa, Veeam, elaborates on the growing popularity of Tape as a Service. He says: "This trend was largely driven by the proliferation of ransomware attacks, which meant that the only form of backup that was truly inaccessible to cyber criminals, was one that couldn't be accessed via the Internet. Tape data can't be accessed or manipulated, it provides a fully disconnected backup. Which is why I'm advocating a fourth step be added to the 3-2-1 rule, that of an air gap."
Resseler concludes by comparing backup to insurance, saying "you have it just in case you need it, but when you need it, it had better work."
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