Most businesses are complacent when it comes to their data storage – that is, until catastrophe strikes.
Data needs to serve the company. It has, after all, become the driving force behind successful modern businesses. An organisation needs a comprehensive storage portfolio that ensures it has the right tools for the right task, driving innovation across the enterprise.
From database and virtualisation to big data, mobile and cloud ultra-high-performance data, storage solutions are the key to driving business innovation.
So, how do you store, manage, monetise, secure and optimise the explosive volume and velocity of data, while ensuring it’s useful and available to users whenever and wherever needed? How do you scale up capacity and performance while balancing customer requirements within a defined space, infrastructure and budget?
IT experts from leading businesses swapped ideas, discussed pain points and offered advice at a recent TechCentral CIO Perspectives Roundtable, sponsored by Pinnacle and Huawei, in a bid to answer the question: “Is storage optimisation the key to driving business success?”
As stated by Daniel Robus, the roundtable facilitator, the first mass storage system recorded in history could very well be the Royal Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh in modern day Iraq. This 7BC library had 30 000 cuneiform tablets that recorded religious, medical, mathematical and historical texts as well as contracts and administrative texts. The tablets were mainly organised by shape, separated according to contents, and placed in different rooms. This raises the question: How do you store, safeguard and use your data?
For Tony Christodoulou, vice president of IT and process excellence (Europe, Middle East and Africa) at American Tower Corporation, how a business uses its data as an asset is more important than storage capability. “That is why we spend a lot of time on business processes. Because, at the end of the day, the data is not going to get any better for you if you cannot convert it into assets.”
While many of the experts say they use cloud-based storage for their personal data, some say their companies still utilise on-premises data storage. “We believe that keeping our data on-premises means it is safe and secure. That it is not going anywhere,” says Natasha Davies, education portfolio manager, Pinnacle Huawei.
For Shiloh Naiken, deputy director-general: CIO from the department of basic education, data storage is a combination of the cloud and the end user’s PC. “As much as we have our data stored in the cloud, people extract it to their computers because it is more easily accessible that way.”
Another player in the financial sector, Citibank, adopted a hybrid model. “Data storage is not a high priority because, lately, it has become a utility that you can use with services like Microsoft, Google and Amazon,” says Raoul Blignaut, head of IT compliance at Citibank.
The roundtable further discussed the factors that influence a business’s storage decisions. Luyanda Ntuane, CIO and chief digital officer at Motus Retail and Rental feels that governance, cost and portability are some of the things to take into consideration when deciding on a data storage solution.
“Another factor that plays a critical role is the solution’s customer-support ability, and of course, security — how do you secure, not the access to the data, but the storage environment itself.”
The elements that are important to Avsharn Bachoo, Comair’s CIO, is to understand what you are buying when you are acquiring a data storage solution, and how to motivate the decision to the rest of the decision-making team.
Accessibility of data for applications is another factor that should be taken into consideration. “Applications, architected with the absolute precision of performance, right down to the level of your humanity hierarchy, determines how the application accesses the cache.”
When it comes to security, Ntuane said that “there is no one-size-fits-all solution”. He believes that the cloud is the best place for a business to store its data. But, said Robus, with statistics that estimate that 10% of all fraud and data breaches are internal, mass storage could well be to blame.
The big question stands. Does storage optimisation drive business success? The consensus from roundtable attendees is that storage optimisation ultimately influences not only business strategy and processes but also the bottom line.
- This promoted content was paid for by the party concerned