 "Making Storage Virtualisation A Cakewalk")
How are you managing your data intelligently? What are the innovative ways that you have adopted?
In today’s time data is growing at a very fast rate is just going to increase as we go forward. So storing and managing this data it becomes an extremely demanding task. In order to ensure smooth functioning of this mounting data, we at Siemens IT Solutions & Services have put in place a virtualisation strategy. Data consolidation is a big challenge that we are facing. Most of the time data is duplicated in bulk and due to lack of information life cycle management of data, there is no proper storage or archiving and processes in place. To simplify the process, we identify the dormant data and its various sources, utilise the information cost effectively and in turn also reduce our data footprint.
What pain-points do CIOs/IT heads have with regard to data? How can they overcome them?
The main concern of CIOs today is security of data. Some things that they need to keep in mind with regard to this, include, identification of the correct data set from the dormant data, and storing the important and useful data. These pain-points can be overcome by using data weeding, data mining, classification trees and affinity mapping.
What data security issues do CIOs face and how can they counter them?
In order to tackle security, one has to first understand the data threats- whether they are natural, thefts, market espionage or hacking of application, failure of infrastructure or other unknown risks. When there is an understanding of this, one needs to streamline policies and organise vehicles that define the information, which needs to be protected and secured. It is also important to figure out the provision of access to respective users. Data users need to know about the classification of data, access continuity and cryptography encryption. There should also be a disposal process.
What storage trends do you see gaining prominence?
Some major trends I see emerging in the storage space are storage virtualisation, storage optimisation, adoption of data deduplication, data compression and automated tiering of data. Among these trends data deduplication and automated tiering of data are going to be aggressively adopted.