The Regional Manager for Middle East at Veeam, Claude Schuck discusses the five stages modern businesses are adopting to realise the importance of data.
Claude Schuck, Regional Manager for Middle East at Veeam
Today’s businesses face the dual challenges of not only managing and mining the data they produce and use, but also ensuring that the digital experience that is generated using the data is always-on for both internal and external customers. To solve these challenges, business leaders need a deeper understanding of how data is changing and how new technologies and approaches can unleash its full value.
- The Criticality of Data – The need to ensure that data is secure, protected and in compliance is increasingly a mission-critical ask for business outcomes.
- The Growth of Data – The sheer amount of data, its rapid growth, changes, and related costs of managing it, is a massive challenge for businesses.
- The Sprawl of Data – Data is generated from a wider variety of sources than ever before. Managing and mining this data is an increasing challenge.
To meet this new reality, where data is scattered across many different clouds and systems, it’s not enough for data to be backed up, secure, and available. Data must move to a new state of intelligence, automatically able to anticipate need and meet demand, securely, across multi-cloud infrastructures to meet the expectations of the mobile, always-on world. Businesses need to become ‘Available’. To achieve this, Veeam has introduced the Five Stages of Intelligent Data Management. Through this journey, your business gains the insights and agility to deliver innovative digital services and new experiences that improve how we live and work.
The Five Stages of Intelligent Data Management for the Modern Business
Stage One: Backup – Protect all workloads using backups, complemented by snapshots and replication where appropriate, to ensure they are always recoverable and available in the event of outages, attack, loss or theft.
Provide for the security of data from a systemic perspective; secure, back up, and recover your data wherever it is so it can always be protected against outages, attack, loss, or theft. This stage is about making sure you can get your data back if it is lost or compromised, and that your business can survive; however, there are minimal data insights at this stage, and data is often stored in individual silos.
Stage Two: Visibility – View the full breadth of your data, accompanied by the infrastructure that it passes through and resides on, so that you that can pivot from reactive to proactive management for better business decisions
Providing a “single pane of glass” view so that the full view of one’s environment allows data management to evolve from a reactive measure, focus on remediating issues that have already occurred, to a proactive measure, preventing any loss in availability through advanced monitoring, resource optimization, capacity planning and built-in intelligence.
Stage Three: Activation – Leverage your well-managed data for additional use cases that unlock greater business value or accelerate business initiatives.
Gain full operational insight into data along with the ability to glean business insights from data to drive better business decisions and outcomes.
Stage Four: Orchestration – Optimize data utilization across multi-cloud environments with workflows that ensure consistent execution of otherwise manual and complex data management tasks.
Ensure that data is always on the right infrastructure, always protected, always ready to do work. This stage delivers orchestration capabilities so that workloads can move more easily from one infrastructure to another, providing business continuity and resource optimization via automation informed by policies. Getting from here to the next stage moves us beyond policy-based mechanisms to true automation.
Stage Five: Automation – Data becomes self-managing by learning to protect itself with appropriate SLAs, methods, and locations in order to meet business objectives or comply with broader IT initiatives.
Data becomes intelligent, location-aware, and self-managing. It learns how to make itself easier to access, back up, recover, and use; how to best interact with and optimize the infrastructure on which it resides and through which it moves to meet its obligations to the business, to security regulators, and to users of the company’s services. And how to react automatically to anomalous behaviour in the system. At stage five, you achieve true Intelligent Data Management in your business.
