Managing data intelligently to achieve optimum business performance
Claude Schuck, Regional Manager for Middle East and Central Africa at Veeam

Managing data intelligently to achieve optimum business performance

Claude Schuck, Regional Manager for Middle East and Central Africa at Veeam, talks to us about managing data intelligently in order to reap its full business value.

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 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: Back up – Back up all workloads and ensure they are always recoverable 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: Aggregation – Ensure protection and availability of data across multi-cloud environments to drive digital services and ensure an aggregated view of service-level compliance

Aggregate data protection for physical, virtual and cloud workloads so that you have central management across various data locations, enabling multi-cloud use cases. This stage allows instant access to any data, any app, anywhere to drive recovery, analytics, application development and uninterrupted digital services; the ability to extract full value from your data is just beginning at this point.

Stage three: Visibility – Improve management of data across multi-cloud environments with clear, unified visibility and control into usage, performance issues and operations

Gain full operational insight into data along with the ability to glean business insights from data to drive better business decisions and outcomes. This stage provides a ‘single pane of glass’ so that a full view of one’s environment allows data management to evolve from a reactive measure, focused on remediating issues that have already occurred, to a proactive measure, preventing any loss in data availability through advanced monitoring, resource optimisation, capacity planning and built-in intelligence. The ability to leverage the value of data is much greater in this stage; however, it is still inefficient and largely dependent on manual processes.

Stage four: Orchestration – Seamlessly move data to the best location across multi-cloud environments to ensure business continuity, compliance, security and optimal use of resources for business operations

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 optimisation 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 back itself up, migrate to ideal locations based on business needs, secure itself during anomalous activity and recover instantaneously

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 optimise 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.

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