Most companies have or plan to implement a hybrid cloud solution for storing their data to reduce cost and increase overall efficiency. An essential component of any migration strategy is making data-driven decisions about what data to migrate and what to keep on-premises which requires understanding the type of information that is contained within their unstructured data. According to an ESG report, without this information, 55% of organizations ended up moving workloads back to on-premises storage due to concerns with security, cost, and compliance. The main takeaway is you can’t make strategic decisions about what to send to the cloud if you don’t understand the risk, value, and waste in your data.
That is where Data Insight can help. It provides visibility inside your unstructured files, as well as permission details and risk levels so you can make data-driven decisions about your data migration strategy to ensure you follow your business policies while also minimizing overall cost.
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It works by first gathering important information such as:
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Data Insight then runs classification. Using the more than 700 preconfigured data classification patterns and more than 120 policies, it can identify files containing:
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Using the information gathered, Data Insight considers attributes such as permissions, number of active users, and sensitive files in a share to assign a risk score to help administrators easily identify shares that have a higher level of risk. |
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Data Insight also includes the option to include metadata enrichment, which allows you to add business context to your data such as location, business unit, or cost code. |
Once Data Insight has captured the important information, it displays it for you in a series of graphs/charts/reports making it easy for you to gain visibility inside your data.
All the captured data is also indexed making it easy for you to filter through the data for any specific combinations you want. For example, you could filter for all stale data not owned by HR, or all data containing personal (PII) or sensitive category data stored in a specific country.
The query and filter of the data can be done using APIs or Data Insight’s web-based graphical user interface (GUI).
The results of this filtering are presented within the GUI where Data Insight can take appropriate action such as delete, copy, archive, enforce retention, attribute metadata, or export results in a CSV, PDF, or HTML file report.
The filtered results can be used to:
Use Data insight to optimize costs when migrating data, including what data is safe to delete or migrate and choosing the appropriate tiers within the cloud.
Delete unnecessary files
Data Insight identifies redundant, outdated, and trivial data and provides their total size, path, and account details. Authorized users can use Data Insight UI to delete these unnecessary files from the primary storage rather than paying to migrate and store it data in the cloud. Data Insight will maintain an audit log of the request and action.
Determine the optimal cloud storage tier/class
Cloud-based storage vendors offer options as to the tier/class of storage. Some include higher availability, while others offer lower performance. Storing all files in one tier may be overkill and end up costing more than is necessary. Instead, Data Insight can help you optimize your cost in your migration strategy by identifying files by categories such as age and type of data. This type of information can identify which files haven’t been accessed in many years. If you need to retain this information it may not require the highest cost storage class, instead, it may be ok to store it in lower-cost storage. While other files that are identified as recently accessed may need to be stored where they can be retrieved faster.
Data Insight provides the visibility needed before migrating data to the cloud, to review and clean up permissions assignments to ensure they are set appropriately, in adherence with permission best practices and in compliance with your management policies.
Often business policies restrict what type of data can be stored in the cloud. For example, they may restrict storing personal data, regulated data, or intellectual property in the cloud. Data Insight can identify files containing this type of information, so it can be excluded from the migration and remain on-premises.
Adhere to compliance regulations
Some regulations require that certain data must be stored with a particular level of protection and a specific retention period. Data Insight can identify which files are governed by various data privacy, financial, healthcare and government regulations. You can use this information in your migration strategy to ensure files containing this information are stored appropriately.
Data locality
Some regulations require that personal data be stored in the same region as the person unless there is a valid business reason to store it elsewhere. Data Insight can identify personal data from over 45 countries. You filter for files containing this type of information to ensure your migration strategy stores these in cloud-based storage in the proper location.
Because Data Insight gathers information from both on-premise and cloud-based data sources IT administrators can also use the information to ensure ongoing data management including ensuring compliance to industry and government regulations as well as business policies.
In summary, Data Insight provides IT administrators with the information they need about their data to optimize their migration strategy.
For more information on Data Insight see https://www.veritas.com/insights/data-insight and for more information on Intelligent Data Migration check out my white paper.
