Companies need help managing unstructured data as it continues to grow by 30 to 60% per year.
The 43rd IT Press Tour had the opportunity to meet with Piyush Mehta, CEO of Data Dynamics to get his thoughts on the current state of how enterprises are structuring unstructured data.
Data Dynamics has created a unified unstructured data management platform that empowers digital transformation with data analytics, mobility, security, and compliance. Demand for the solution is great as unstructured data continues to grow at 30 to 60% per year.
Data Management Trends in 2022
Piyush is seeing four consistent trends that align with the unabated growth of unstructured data.
1) Acceleration to the Cloud
Moving applications and data into the cloud is known as cloud migration. In a migration project, on-premises data repositories may be consolidated to the cloud, or new cloud data repositories and/or data lakes may be built. Cloud migration enables seamless scalability, the utility-based cost for data storage, a reliable backup facility, and efficient disaster recovery.
2) Ransomware
Ransomware is malware designed to prevent users or organizations from accessing their data. Cyberattacks encrypt files and demand a ransom payment to decrypt them resulting in business disruption and potentially inappropriate use of the stolen data. Every company is looking for ways to protect their data, proactively mitigate risk, and adhere to regulatory compliance.
3) Data Lakes to Data Oceans
The processing of big data jobs was done in individual data lakes. Over time, data lakes sprawled exponentially leading to exponential storage footprint, incremental exposure to rogue access, and lack of collaboration. Data oceans have replaced data lakes to ease data sharing and data mining, get more value from stored data, and reduce the storage footprint.
4) Privacy Protection
Keeping individual and business data private and secure is key for enterprises to build trust with their customers and avoid financial penalties for failure to protect PII in the age of GDPR and CCPA. It is critical for companies to identify and protect personal data, adhere to internal and regulatory compliance requirements, ensure trust, and reduce reputational risk. Data privacy used to be an operational nuisance, it has risen to a board-level issue.
How the Data Management Platform Works
The data management platform empowers data democratization to run the business via an innovation platform in four ways.
Cloud enablement which is safe and secure, provides 66% faster time-to-value, along with data mobility and analytics across hybrid multi-cloud environments.
Secure and protect data to reduce ransomware risk, increase privacy and risk awareness, and improve backup efficacy, while reducing footprint and cost.
Data augmentation provides enriched data for the digital enterprise, builds effective data repositories, drives business transformation, and provides competitive differentiation.
Data sharing across the enterprise that's secure, decentralized, customer empowered, and easy to implement and access.
The Business Value of a Data Management Platform
A data management platform provides insight and analysis via an understanding of the data. It enables actionability and remediation to address risk and reduce liability. It provides data management and mobility in hybrid multi-cloud environments. It provides value by enabling data to be shared in a secure manner across the enterprise, ensuring data remains in compliance with necessary governance, enabling informed data-led decisions, and providing ROI within one year via optimization.
Case Studies
600 terabytes of data and associated security migrated in 20 days. One of the top 5 energy companies in the world decided to use Azure, specifically Azure NetApp Files as their cloud storage. Using the Data Dynamics StorageX Migration Module, the energy company automated the migration of Windows and Unix source files across heterogeneous storage resources to Azure. In addition to the data migration, StorageX ensured that the associated security was effectively copied and provided in Azure. This successful data migration to Azure helped in data center closure timelines, leading to cost avoidance of facility and hardware lease extensions. More importantly, it provided the business units the ability to use the power of the cloud to create competitive business differentiators. The power of automation via StorageX ensures installation, migration of data, and security in 20 days.
Risk analysis and ransomware avoidance for 8 billion files. A global pharmaceutical company was worried about rogue access to their global file estate and wanted to ensure they identified files with information that required protection. Data Dynamics Insight AnalytiX was chosen as the solution of choice to help analyze the content within the files to identify personally identifiable information as well as business-sensitive data that was stored in the Customer’ Callibra repository. By analyzing the file content, Data Dynamics provided the customer with a risk profile, including content identified, data sprawl, access, and ownership details, and other key characteristics of the files. This risk analysis provided the Company clarity on where potential exposure exists and in turn quantifies the exposure as well as starts planning remediation actions. To remediate, they chose Data Dynamics’ ControlX Module to quarantine and in turn prevent a ransomware attack.
Consolidate multiple data lakes into a single cloud-based repository. A European life sciences organization had more than 100 independent data lakes that were managed between several business units, aggregating to more than 3 petabytes of data. The customer wanted to migrate these Hadoop clusters to the cloud into a single ‘data ocean’ so they may consolidate the footprint and take advantage of compute scalability. The Company chose Data Dynamics StorageX Mobility Suite as its solution of choice. The StorageX Mobility Suite helped identify the Hadoop resources and then initiate data migration to the cloud-based S3 object storage. StorageX was able to drive policy-based data movement as well as identify areas of data duplication within the legacy estate. StorageX migrated 3 petabytes of data in a matter of days while reducing 20% of the aggregate storage footprint.
Identification and compliance of 6 Million customer files. A large US grocery chain wanted to ensure it was meeting the data compliance requirements for the states within which it had a presence and mitigate any risks of data exposure. Using the entire Unified Unstructured Data Management Platform from Data Dynamics, the Customer was able to identify over six million files that belonged to 3.2 million customers. Data identified included customer names, addresses (including state of residence), loyalty program passwords, and credit card information. This empowered the customer to know what data they had on which customers, (something one of the states they had a presence in required) as well as ensure that these records were protected and accessed by only those individuals that absolutely had a need to access them. It led to better quality controls around its security and provided a rapid means to respond to customer requests for their respective data footprint.
Key Takeaways
A unified, unstructured data management platform:
Enables data analytics, mobility, security, and compliance.
Provides accurate insights into a global file estate.
Enables actionability and remediation to address potential risks and ensure compliance.