The modern era of stricter compliance regulations and more privacy savvy consumers changes the backup and disaster recovery paradigms. It necessitates that enterprises obtain a complete, centralized and searchable data repository – as well as more sophisticated risk monitoring, management and eDiscovery capabilities. It also necessitates fast and granular recoverability and deletion of copy data. This is no easy feat as data becomes distributed across an ever-growing number of heterogeneous devices, as data is spread out across increasingly distributed enterprises, and as the application landscape also grows and requires increasingly distinct service level agreements (SLAs).
The cloud presents a solution to this problem, provided it is used intelligently. Many enterprises are migrating a growing percentage of their backup and archive data to the cloud but are still managing processes such as the creation and storage of indexes on premises. When it comes to facilitating eDiscovery and compliance with varied regulations across sprawling data pools, this can add significant cost and complexity. Storage Switzerland advises harnessing the scalable compute power of the cloud to cost-effectively optimize data privacy and compliance.
To ensure comprehensive data retention and end-to-end visibility, storage managers should first evaluate the ability to capture, index and search data that is generated across all devices and applications. This can help to obtain a singular audit trail, for verifiability that compliance regulations are being followed, to help in verifying the authenticity of data, and to prove chain of custody. Furthermore, federated metadata search capabilities can enable the enterprise to more easily locate data and can help to comply with “the right to be forgotten” and eDiscovery requests (for example pinpointing sensitive financial records).
Automated compliance monitoring and management is also useful, when it comes to being able to more quickly and easily identify and remediate risks for sensitive data such as protected health information (PHI), personally identifiable information (PII) and intellectual property (IP). Storage managers should consider capabilities such as the ability to use predefined templates that verify against industry regulations or that are customized to the enterprise’s requirements, and the ability to configure data governance policies to segregate data on a geographic basis.
Once securely stored and searchable, copy data must also be readily recoverable. StorageSwiss views disaster recovery as one of the prime use cases of the cloud, as it provides scalable compute capacity that may be spun up quickly and paid for based on actual usage. Furthermore, the cloud was built for remote access and high availability. Watch our on demand webinar with Druva, “All in the Cloud – Data Protection Up, Costs Down,” for more discussion on how to use the cloud for a more effective approach to backup and disaster recovery.
Senior Analyst, Krista Macomber produces analyst commentary and contributes to a range of client deliverables including white papers, webinars and videos for Storage Switzerland. She has a decade of experience covering all things storage, data center and cloud infrastructure, including: technology and vendor portfolio developments; customer buying behavior trends; and vendor ecosystems, go-to-market positioning, and business models. Her previous experience includes leading the IT infrastructure practice of analyst firm Technology Business Research, and leading market intelligence initiatives for media company TechTarget.
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