Navigating the hurdles of data management

Ravi Rajendran

Vice President – APJ, Cohesity

The latest IDC Global DataSphere report – which presents a five-year forecast on how much new data is created, captured, replicated, and consumed each year – reveals the global datasphere is expected to more than double in size from 2022 to 2026, with enterprises leading the growth over the next five years. 

Managing and protecting business critical data builds the foundation for cyber resilience. CIO World Asia spoke with Ravi Rajendran, Vice President – APJ, Cohesity to find out more on best practices in data management and Cohesity’s DMaaS portfolio.

Best Practices For Data Management

1. Embrace your data generation: Increased technology adoption, accelerated by the pandemic, has resulted in excessive data generation that IT and security teams must now adequately manage, govern, and protect, to benefit from it.
   
2. Review your data policies and management approach: Consider how you are collecting, governing, managing, storing, protecting, and backing up data. Relying on the way data has always been managed, and with legacy data management technology, isn’t enough in today’s cyber threat environment. Work backwards from the outcome you are looking to achieve and review your data management technology based on its next-gen capabilities.

3. Invest in immutable data management technology: Invest in data management technology that has immutability baked in and not added as an afterthought. Immutable backups and their data cannot be modified, encrypted or deleted, making them one of the purest ways to tackle ransomware as they ensure the original back job is kept inaccessible. 

4. Add a +1 to the 3-2-1 rule for backups: Under this rule, you must have at least three copies of your data, store the copies on two different types of media, and keep one backup copy offline or offsite. This simple approach means you will always have an available and usable backup of your data and systems. Offsite and offline backups not only limit the effects of ransomware but help to maintain business continuity. However, now it’s time to consider going beyond by adding a +1 to the 3-2-1 rule by leveraging data isolation solutions that provide an isolated and protected backup that can be quickly restored from (they are likely to be more cost and recovery friendly too).
   
5. Practice makes perfect: You may already have a backup schedule and may have implemented the 3-2-1 rule, however, testing the implementation of your backup and recovery solutions, and how long it will take to recover from your backup is vital. 

Cohesity’s DMaaS Portfolio For Cyber Resiliency

Cohesity’s Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) portfolio of solutions offers customers the ability to consume Cohesity offerings the way they want. They can manage Cohesity software on their own, through a partner, or have Cohesity manage their infrastructure for them via these new SaaS offerings. This means that organisations are given the full freedom to decide which delivery method they want to use to optimally meet their dynamically changing data management requirements, these could range from wanting to move from CapEx to OpEx spend when it comes to backing up their data, acquire the ability to house their data backups in an isolated cloud vault or be able to air-gap, or accelerating their adoption of hybrid cloud environments.

Cohesity FortKnox – What’s In It For CIOs

For CIOs, legacy environments and outdated technology solutions create unnecessary complexity when it comes to managing their growing data footprints, which have been accelerated by the pandemic and its increased technology adoption. Increased data footprints create larger attack surfaces for malicious actors. 

Cohesity FortKnox simplifies complexity by providing a modern SaaS solution for isolating data in the cloud that minimises attack surfaces and improves recovery time SLAs. Additionally, it also helps improve ransomware attack and recovery preparedness by identifying clean copies of data to minimize the risk of reinfection. The software is unique in that it is provided in an ‘as a service’ offering that an organisation can subscribe to, vault their data, and then run drills from that isolated environment. 

Data management entails much more than simply collecting and analysing data. The data that is analysed must be properly stored or disposed of as needed. The volume of data is only set to rise as enterprises of all scales look to increase their data capacity. Thus, it is crucial that proper data management strategies and systems are put to practice now.