Is the cloud the next thing for long-term data retention? Looking at the key vendors in the space
For any organisation in this era, there is a realization on how data is critical for business needs and operations.
An enormous amount of data has been produced already after the
disruption of cloud computing into various types of organisation, be it
education, finance, healthcare or manufacturing. Today, organisations are more
concerned about the data which has been developed in the last 15 to 20 years
due to the surge of IT infrastructure.
This data and applications are probably not being used actively,
but it is important to organisations as this data contains critical
information, having compliance requirements around it. Security of old data
(unstructured content, applications, virtual machines) is becoming crucial
for the organisation. There has to be a cost effective and reliable archiving
solution to store and secure data while gaining rapid access when needed.
In the past, IT management used to save the data in tape drives
or on premises data centres without any filtering. But the data demands
have drastically changed.
Even more data will be produced in the next five to
seven years as more digitally connected devices become part of
business operations. Data will be fuel for any business as they will
abstract analytical information to get ahead of the competition or to be
aligned with consumer demands. This digital transformation is not just to
acquire new technology enhancement but to save CAPEX and OPEX every time when
the data centre moves ahead in innovations.
As data grows, edge computing architecture will enable data
centre systems to get closer to digital devices for processing of
information (machine learning/analysis) and only a small set of information
will be pushed to the cloud or private data centre.
How will organisations deal will past data when
real-time data will also need to get archived for reference? How will
organisations deal with data in hybrid cloud or a multi-cloud model where
private and public cloud will be utilized for different data processing
purposes? Will there be automation available for constantly syncing
data based on archival methods that will get integrated in an archival
strategy? What about the security from external breaches or physical damages to
archival systems?
There are various vendors who have developed solutions to
address these needs. Organisations have different choices to select a solution
which fits their requirements and can be customized as per the budget. In this
post, I have taken a look at data archival solutions from leading vendors like
Rubrik, Cohesity and Zerto. Let’s evaluate their solutions.
Cohesity’s solutions allow
you to leverage both cloud and tapes to archive the data based on the
organisation's requirements. The solution they call cloud-native is where, apart from
tapes, archival is possible on public clouds, private clouds, Amazon
S3-compatible devices and QStar managed tape libraries. The solution enables IT
management to define workflow policies for automated backup and archival.
It consists of two Cohesity products: Cloud Archive & Data
Protect.
Cloud Archive allows to leverage public cloud for long term data
retention, while Data Protect helps to reduce long term retention and
archival cost with its pay as you go cost model.
