Is the cloud the next thing for long-term data retention?

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.