"It's time for a data management revolution in the Middle East"- CommVault exec (page 1 of 2)

By Allen Mitchell, Senior Technical Account Manager, Mena at CommVault Systems

There is no doubt that data management has gone through an evolutionary process, starting with a focus on straight forward backup and recovery in the 1990's and then moving to integrated protection solutions in the 2000s. However the impact of Big Data and the move to adopt a more mobile way of working again requires a radical new approach.

Whether it is stored in one place, distributed across the enterprise or located in different geographies, data growth is making its presence felt in companies of all sizes in the Middle East. It's unfortunately becoming all too common for yesterday's backups to run into tomorrow and too many companies are reporting that they risk missing Service Level Agreements (SLA) if processes can't keep up. In itself this is perhaps an indication that existing storage strategies are no longer capable of tackling huge volumes of data or, just as importantly, of supporting the business challenges of today.

Allen Mitchell, Senior Technical Account Manager, MENA at CommVault Systems says that a revolution in data management in the region is now called for in order to minimise the investments needed to protect and manage large volumes of data both inside and outside of the data centre. This means thinking differently about each of the traditional data management processes and technologies and increasing the use of automation and enterprise-wide policies to introduce efficiencies and cost savings whilst reducing management headaches at the same time. Instead of creating archive, backup and storage silos merely as a business insurance policy, each element should be valued equally but then converge to streamline the process and start to make data the real asset that it should be to an organisation.

So far, it's likely that making data work for an organisation will have involved trying to mine large volumes of existing data across multiple storage types and locations to gain new insights - perhaps for research projects or compliance challenges but this can then put a massive strain on operational staff who are already overstretched.

Adopting the cloud and looking at virtualisation is widely accepted as one of the best ways to increase efficiency but it also adds another layer of complexity to data management which must be addressed. The Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) movement again offers potential savings but also introduces new risks to data security at the edge as well as the challenge of getting information on to these devices efficiently.

CIOs and the right tools

It should be no surprise then that according to Gartner, 2012, only 26% of CIOs think they have effective tools and skill sets in place to manage these issues and to make data an asset to the organisation. What is needed is a scalable modern information management architecture that is fit for purpose; helping businesses to protect and manage more information more efficiently. It should also be able to meet the demands of a virtual world that is typified by a dynamic pool of computing and storage.

At the heart of this modern information structure should lie the ability to collect data just once to reduce the overall storage and infrastructure burden, and then enable access to it from anywhere in order to re-purpose it. Snapshot, backup and archive data operations already take place, so why not combine those tasks into a collection process that sends deduplicated data to single 'content store'?

This drives a large number of efficiencies; the content store can then be used for recovery or repurposing of the data.