The adoption of advanced digital transformation initiatives has placed massive amounts of data at the heart of the business—changing the nature of how archives should be leveraged.
See the data behind these trends and more with this Enterprise Strategy Group Infographic, The Transformational Rise of Active Archives.
The digital economy is fueled by the seemingly unstoppable creation and insatiable consumption of data. To optimize costs, streamline management, and meet governance and regulatory requirements, organizations have traditionally archived non-production data on lower-cost storage tiers for years with little intention or need to reuse them. Things are evolving: The emergence and adoption of advanced digital transformation initiatives in recent years have placed data at the heart of the business and changed the nature of how archives can and should be leveraged. Rather than passive, “locked away” data sets, the past few years have seen the emergence of new requirements and solutions to make archives more “active” and leverageable to unlock business value.
ESG conducted a comprehensive online survey of IT professionals from private- and public-sector organizations in North America (United States and Canada) between May 18, 2021 and May 25, 2021. To qualify for this survey, respondents were required to be IT professionals responsible for data protection technology decisions for their organizations, specifically data archiving and long-term retention strategies. Additionally, organizations were required to have an active archive strategy.
This Master Survey Results presentation focuses on the technologies and processes in place to support data archiving and long-term retention requirements, with specific attention to the impact of active archive strategies.
Much of the data economy about individuals being amassed in our digital world is subject to consumer data privacy regulations and controls; yet on a near-daily basis, sensitive data is shared, lost, leaked, and breached in organizations. ESG recently completed research to uncover how organizations view the state of data privacy and compliance and how navigating these regulations affects their programs, teams, spending, and the maturity of privacy-enhancing and data security technologies.
It can be easy to think, “That sounds horrible! But it probably won’t happen to me.” From getting into a fender bender, to spilling ketchup on your new white shirt, to… ransomware attacks. Believing ransomware attacks will only happen to “somebody else” can put your organization at a huge risk. On a much larger scale than buying car insurance or bringing an extra shirt, taking precautions against ransomware attacks can save your organization millions of dollars, as well as employee confidence, customer trust, and more.
Ransomware is a type of malware, spread by methods such as phishing. It encrypts the files of a user or organization and blocks access to these files until a ransom is paid. Statistically, it is more likely than not that your organization will be met with a ransomware attack in the next 12 months, as attacks are becoming more and more common. According to ESG research, 70% of respondents experienced, “At least one attempted ransomware attack within the last year.”* Cyber criminals are getting more creative in their attacks, so it is crucial to have an equally thoughtful protection plan.
It pays to do the proper research and narrow in on the data protection and storage solutions that can help you plan for a quick and reliable recovery after a ransomware attack. These solutions include features like tamper-proof backup images (a.k.a. immutability) and network-isolated disaster recovery (e.g., air gap). Organizations should also take into consideration the solution’s speed, ease of management, reliability, etc.
To make it easier to narrow in on the right solution for your organization, Enterprise Strategy Group has evaluated and documented these features for many solutions, and “Why This Matters” to the business, in a variety of recently published reports. If you’d like to learn more about how to reliably recover from a ransomware attack, and about “Why This Matters” for your business – check out these recently published ESG Validation reports: Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery with CyberSense and IBM Cyber Resilience Solutions. These reports are designed to give organizations an independent perspective of a product or solution and help you to better understand the value propositions.
Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) is an IT analyst, research, validation, and strategy firm that gives the global IT community access to market intelligence and actionable insight. The Validation Team creates assets, such as Economic and Technical Validation Reports, videos, webinars and more, that help to communicate the technological and economic value of IT products and solutions.
*Source: ESG Research Report, Tape’s Place in an Increasingly Cloud-based IT Landscape, January 2021.
In this Data Protection Conversations video, I talk with Matt Waxman of Cohesity about:
For more videos in the series, please visit: https://www.esg-global.com/coverage/data-protection-conversations.
Over the last few years, there has been a disconnect by which organizations rely on their SaaS vendors to protect, back up, and recover their data when they should actually perform their own backups. Younger organizations have more faith in their SaaS providers, while older organizations have the experience to back up and protect their own data. Some of the bigger names in the as-a-service industry are mission-critical to countless organizations, but they still require organizations to put their own strategies in place.
Business intelligence is the key to data-driven success according to new Enterprise Strategy Group research—with organizations on the leading-edge of data analytics usage revealing they enjoy a variety of competitive advantages.
See the data behind these trends and more with this Infographic, The Path to Data Leadership: Embracing Business Intelligence to Achieve Data-driven Success.
In this video, I talk data protection with Joe Noonan of Unitrends. Our topics of discussion included:
For more from my Data Protection Conversations series, please visit: https://www.esg-global.com/coverage/data-protection-conversations.
Data teams and developers continue to serve as the lynchpin to businesses, overcoming shortcomings associated with more rapidly and reliably gaining insight from growing data sets. With improving data analytics for real-time business intelligence (BI) and customer insight consistently ranking as one of the business priorities driving significant technology spending, how are organizations enabling more end-users to actually leverage data? Skills gaps, collaboration, and accessibility have created several barriers for democratizing analytics across organizations, and pressure is being placed on data and software teams to make business intelligence easier to leverage and consume. But with the dynamic nature of the business being what it is today and the constant shifting of priorities, timeliness of delivery and accessibility of simplified analytics are being scrutinized. Embedded analytics is increasingly becoming the answer.
While AI is still considered nascent, the impact it is having on organizations that are embracing it early and often is profound. This serves as a key component to why organizations continue placing bets on AI. Even as skills gaps remain when it comes to incorporating AI into the business, organizations simply cannot afford to wait in adopting the technology as they risk being disrupted by the competition using AI today. With the rise of AI tools that simplify and automate several, if not all aspects of the AI lifecycle, expect adoption of AI to continue exploding for years to come.
Organizations continue to prioritize AI investments with a goal of achieving a more data-centric future. While business objectives point to several areas where AI can help improve businesses both internally and externally, time to value continues to be scrutinized as organizations make massive investments in people, processes, and technology in support of AI initiatives. Opportunities to reduce time to value continue to pave the way for AI technology vendors that can help simplify the adoption and use of AI technology to support a growing number of use cases throughout the business.