I love to talk futures with my exceptionally intelligent colleagues and conversing with Josh Stageberg is no exception. Josh runs product management for some of the most innovative offerings coming out of Veritas, including technologies that contribute to our visibility, discovery, and next generation information governance offerings.
We had a great conversation at Veritas Vision 2017 about how secondary data is an immensely under-utilized asset. We also discussed the enormous value that can be realized from secondary data – if an organization understands how to unlock it. Listen to our full conversation in Episode 11: Unlock Your Secondary Data.
Most Secondary Data Simply Wastes Away in Storage
In his Vision keynote, Mike Palmer, Veritas Chief Product Officer, discussed how consumer companies like Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft have created sharing economies built entirely on using data in new and innovative ways. Opportunities to harness the power of data aren’t exclusive to these born-in-the-cloud companies, however. Well-established organizations – even with all their legacy technologies – can equally benefit, but first they need to unlock their secondary data’s potential.
The enterprise “backup estate” is essentially the bulk of an organization’s data, with backup being the biggest contributor to secondary data. In his Vision keynote, Mike noted that this is the “most under-utilized asset” that organizations possess, because this valuable data is rarely actively utilized. Rather, it simply sits in storage waiting for the time when a restore request breathes life into it. Learn more about Mike’s keynote on secondary data in this ComputerWeekly article.
Veritas’ Deep Dive into Secondary Data 4
I asked Josh how Veritas is helping organizations realize the value of their secondary data. “We’ve really just started to scratch the surface in this area,” replied Josh. “You’ll see Veritas go a lot deeper in this space. One example of what we’re doing right now is how Information Map can show you all the data in your production environment faster than any other solution in the market, because we take 70% of the data straight out of NetBackup.”
Using NetBackup to Build a Complete Picture of Your Primary Data Set
Josh continued, “NetBackup is already well-known as one of the fastest, easiest systems in terms of getting at all the primary data in your environment. We can use the secondary data NetBackup creates and build out a picture of your entire primary data set. When I say faster, I mean hours − not days or weeks − to get a petabyte of data. It’s really exciting, but actually this just scratches the surface of what we intend to do.”
NetBackup is Veritas’ flagship data protection product, and it’s typically used in very passive, event-driven ways such as restoring servers, recovering files, etc. In other words, something bad has to happen for companies to realize its value. With Information Map, Josh’s team is helping organizations get a proactive, complete understanding of their data landscape using NetBackup and other data sources.
Josh explained, “We’re building connectors so we can also look at other data sources like Office 365, Amazon S3, Azure Blob Store, and Google Cloud Platform. We can analyze structured and unstructured data. The upside to all of this is that once you understand your information, in all its various forms, you can then take informed action and actually defend and report on what you did.”
GDPR Drives Need for Complete Data Visibility
For many companies, data visibility is currently a top-of-mind issue due to legal privacy issues and the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which will take effect in May 2018. The GDPR requires all businesses to protect the personal data and privacy of EU citizens for transactions that occur within EU member states. Josh explained, “GDPR is causing many organizations to sit up and take notice, because non-compliance results in heavy fines. They realize they’re struggling to gather and locate all the information they need, but it’s really impossible to do that without unified visibility.”
Monetizing Data You No Longer Need
“With true data visibility,” Josh continued, “you can consider some really interesting scenarios like do you consider selling data that’s no longer providing value to your organization? Data monetization is really two or three steps down the road, but it all starts with visibility. Our customers who are using Data Insight and Information Map in these ways are really starting to see the value of it.”
Learn more about Information Map and sign up for your free trial of Information Map.
Listen to the Podcast
Visit iTunes to listen to this ‘Voice of Veritas’ podcast, “Episode 11: Unlock Your Secondary Data” for more insights on unlocking the true value of your secondary data.
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