Workload Jenga: balancing remote working and data growth

Stuart Abbott at Commvault shares insight on how organisations can retain their balance as work environments change after the pandemic

Over the past couple of years, remote working has accelerated businesses towards adopting digitalisation as a matter of business survival. As we come out the other side of the pandemic, 76% of organisations are adopting a permanent hybrid working model.

Like any strategic change, as businesses set about preparing their systems to permanently support remote working, a focus on vision, a sense of urgency, and the necessary budget are crucial.

However, an ongoing problem that all organisations are battling against is the exponential growth and sprawl of data. With an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data generated every day, organisations are left with a complex balancing act in their IT environment.

Building the data tower

Business environments are constantly adapting and growing, forcing organisations to adopt new technologies that align with their changing needs. However, previous technologies are often not retired, leaving infrastructure, workloads, and data types that span multiple generations.

A mix of data and technology is unavoidable as IT continues to evolve - new issues require newer technologies to resolve them - but the proliferation of multi-generational technologies causes data to fragment across the IT estate, creating data silos in its wake.

This makes it difficult to keep up with data demands and creates an unstable environment to manage - much like a toppling tower of Jenga.

If not addressed, data sprawl will create gaps in IT environments, leaving room for failure and slowing down opportunity to digitally transform. With data scattered across the world and no platform to manage it, entry points are left open to attackers, resulting in data loss and difficulties with data recovery.

Data sprawls have been enhanced by the exponential switch to cloud and SaaS-based applications over the past couple of years. To successfully go from an infrastructure-centric environment to a data-centric one, a comprehensive solution that covers all of the IT landscape - not just a percentage of it - is required.

It is hard to put your data to work when it is scattered between silos, cloud, and on-premises storage, and being managed by different back-up solutions. This is because managing data under different solutions leads to disparate environments that are not well-integrated or compatible.

Although each solution seems easy to deploy and use, they force organisations to procure and run multiple solutions to achieve the same level of comprehensiveness as the all-encompassing data protection solution that they need. This can cause bottlenecks in achieving skill ability, decrease visibility to data, and reduce overall IT productivity.  Significantly, it also increases the surface area of attack and risk of exposure.

Don’t let it topple

Intelligent Data Services allow organisations to accelerate business growth whilst protecting data with a single pane of glass. Under one solution, no workload is left behind and all are automatically consolidated to avoid data silos, whilst allowing flexibility to move and manage data.

To manage change successfully in your environment, follow this simple five-step checklist:

1. Deployment flexibility

Select a solution that offers the deployment flexibility you need to maintain broad and deep support for the technologies of today and the future. It is vital that the solution can scale up and scale out to thrive in evolving environments.

2. Simplified IT processes

Use AI and ML-driven data insights to improve the IT processes and make more informed decisions. The improved connectivity that this will provide allows for better customer service, room for product development, and growth opportunities.

3. Broadest workload coverage

You need a data management tool that supports a diverse tech stack, which includes management and data protection from prior, current, and next generations. This will consolidate multiple generations of data with unified protection and provide flexibility to move workloads across your environment seamlessly.

4. Security

It is important to ensure business continuity and recoverability across cloud and on-prem environments, whilst also delivering replication, disaster recovery, and compliance reporting. A centralised security console monitors the entire environment from a unified platform, allowing you to gain insight from your data so you can apply the appropriate levels of data security to mitigate the risk.

5. Rapid recovery

No matter where your data resides, you should be able to recover it quickly, should you need to. By automating disaster recovery and testing across multiple clouds, you can reuse cost, effort, and risk whilst gaining confidence that you can restore data quickly and easily, whether a single file or an entire database.   

These five points will significantly reduce the complexity of your environment and build a strong foundation for your workload Jenga. In order to remain competitive, it is vital that organisations modernise their environment, increase business agility, and ensure all workloads are secured.

When your environment is simplified and protected, you can better serve your customers, create innovative products, and find opportunities to increase revenue streams.

Stuart Abbott is UK&I AVP at Commvault

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com