55 percent organizations believe workload uptime is the CSP’s responsibility. It isn’t

The traffic across global data centers is predicted to touch 19.5 zettabytes by 2021. Just five years back, that number stood at around six zettabytes. From a data repository point of view, traditional data centers will account for just six percent; everything else will be on a public or private cloud by 2021.

Cloud brings agility, performance and lower costs, there’s no denying that. But the question is what does it do with the information?

A lot of it is speeds and feeds, hardware, and infrastructure-as-a-service; but beyond that, there are still a lot of unanswered questions around information management on the cloud.

In a bid to bring to light the current challenges and best practices around information management, Balaji Rao, MD, India & SAARC at Veritas, and Marcus Loh, Senior Director for Technology Practice, Asia-Pacific & Japan at Veritas dispel myths surrounding cloud service providers and highlight what Veritas can do to help CIOs get the maximum out of their data.

Rao pointed out that organizations that are able to leverage meaningful trends and use data intelligently are six percent more profitable, compared to organizations that don’t use this data.

“Most organizations have data silos – they have an application, and the data that comes from that application. And they have many such applications. So when you have such silos, breaking the silo and trying to get meaningful data out of that silo is becoming a huge challenge,” revealed Rao.

Veritas brings to the table a 360-degree data management platform that not only helps protect data, but also ensures business continuity, compliance, visibility, data portability, and optimized storage.

Busting cloud misconceptions

As per Veritas’ ‘Truth in Cloud’ research, it was found that 39 percent of companies backed up only business critical data. But the fact remains that non-business-critical data is also required to run a business.

One of the common misconceptions Rao pointed out was that a cloud service provider provides all the necessary safeguards around data protection. This is not necessarily true. More often than not, the contract specifies that maintaining the necessary protocol to protecting and backing up data is the customers’ responsibility.

Marcus Loh, who is also the head of technology practice at Veritas, drew the attention towards secondary data and believed that it is right now the most under-utilized asset. He said that a lot more could be done with secondary data.

Explaining the importance of secondary data, Loh said that it could be used as a part of the data recovery plan. “If my primary site fails, I can actually leverage secondary data and power up some of the applications,” he said.

Another common misconception is that cloud service providers are responsible for application uptime. The Veritas survey revealed that 83 percent of companies believe that the CSP could protect them against outages, and 55 percent believe that workload uptime is the responsibility of the CSP.

What Veritas brings to the table

To address the need for 100 percent uptime, Veritas brings to the table the ability to lift and shift data to a resilient site with complete automation. “The difference between Veritas and anybody else is the ability to automate the whole nine yards,” said Rao.

Loh threw light on how Veritas leverages AI and machine learning. “We can predict what’s going to happen in your environment and we can recommend a way to back up your infrastructure in a better manner, without having to employ an army of engineers,” he explained.

Rao pointed out that easily 50 percent of data in organizations is dark data, and then there’s ROT (Redundant, Outdated, or Trivial) data. There’s no visibility into this either. “On an average 80 percent of the data is legacy and useless, and all this data lies in expensive storage systems,” he explained. And it’s not just additional expenses CIOs need to worry about. Redundant data is also a prime target for security breaches.

Veritas goes about bridging this gap by ensuring data protection on the cloud. “We have solutions that help de-duplicate data on the cloud. We have adapters that are compatible with AWS, Google and Azure, in addition to hardware form factors that ensure data is directly backed up to the cloud,” said Rao.