The world of enterprise IT is ever changing, and with the turn of every new year IT teams around the world seize the opportunity to examine the latest technology trends and how they might be able to adopt them for their own organizations. So what are the driving trends in IT this year? The German Digital Association “Bitkom” wanted to know more about this and asked companies directly. The results, presented at the end of January, are:
- IT Security (59 percent)
- Cloud Computing (58 percent)
- Industry 4.0 (54 percent)
- Big Data (51 percent)
- Internet of Things (47 percent).
While major opportunities for these businesses, these areas also represent major challenges for them. But is there any underlying technology that could help companies to manage projects in all of these areas? How can favorable conditions be created to advance all of these goals at the same time? Since data is genuinely at the core of all trends, take a look at the data management, more specifically, virtualized data management – and even more specifically – Copy Data Virtualization based on a Copy Data Management platform.
IT Security
No matter the environment, teams should be able to access their data when they need it, but at the same time keep it stored in a safe manner. This is a difficult balancing act, which is ever the more difficult given the growth of the number of redundant data copies that are being created in companies nowadays. Conventional data management concepts hold separate “silos” for use cases such as analysis, backup, development, testing etc. With each additional physical copy of data, the “attack surface” gets larger, leading to greater vulnerability of the data as a whole. Keeping control over sensitive data begins with the reduction and the avoidance of physical data copies to get potential threats under control.
Cloud Computing
Copy Data Virtualization decouples data from its underlying infrastructure for increased agility and reliability of the data. Virtualized data can be made seamlessly available any time anywhere across the entire IT spectrum – from traditional data centers to SaaS and private, hybrid, or public cloud structures. Cost and complexity are greatly reduced. Through incremental data capture and management of a single physical copy, unlimited virtual copies can be made available anywhere for instant access. Enabling companies also for a smooth transition to the cloud. A finely tuned central SLA console defines access rights, recovery and retention policies on an application level.
Industry 4.0
Manufacturing companies starting to embrace Industry 4.0 are looking for ways to cope with the growing mountains of data that their networked machines generate. Only a few of them have yet begun to address the root cause for the reproduction of data copies, namely intentional or unintentional copying by traditional siloed systems. Avoiding uncontrolled data growth should have the foremost priority for these organization in order to generate maximum benefit from the potential of the collected data. The sooner companies reduce the amount of their superfluous physical copies, the sooner they can benefit from more efficient data management and analysis for Industry 4.0.
Big Data
Big Data is the phrase of the decade. If you haven’t heard of Big Data, then you haven’t been paying attention to just about any tech publication for the last five years. Companies are now gathering as much data from their customers, users, and internal processes as possible, and harvesting it for insights previously unavailable to the average enterprise. The majority of this data is redundant physical copies, however, which are created for application development, data security, compliance, business analysis etc. IDC reported that 60 percent of the storage volume on hard drives is wasted for copies of primary data. At the same time regulatory requirements demand quick access to current and historical data. Copy Data Virtualization ensures more efficient data management, without unnecessary physical copies and helps companies to keep up with compliance requirements to eventually benefit from the potential of Big Data.
Internet of Things
The analysis of huge amounts of data from IoT sources could also become a big challenge for companies in the next few years. Costs for the huge amounts of bandwidth required to collect all this data are increasing while the expectation to see the results of the analysis is moving towards real time. It’s here where Copy Data Virtualization excels. The virtualization of data copies in the data center and in the cloud has proven itself to be a much more efficient and faster way for data management. Instead of holding physical IoT data in the cloud, virtual copies for data analysis, testing and development and for data backup can be made available at any time, anywhere, when necessary.
With all IT processes and trends tying back to data, by employing data virtualization, companies can take a significant step toward better protection of their most valuable asset and address a number of current trends in their data center at the same time.
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