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Enterprise Data Management Predictions for 2017

PeterGrimmond
Level 1
Employee

As we enter the New Year, I’ve been thinking about what it might hold for enterprises when it comes to the way they manage their data. Here are a few predictions:

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1.  Businesses will turn to the Cloud to provide improved business continuity

Until recently, there have been two significant inhibitors to the use of public / share clouds for disaster recovery (D.R.). The first was concerns over data residency and the second was a lack of tools to effectively manage the migration of workloads from a primary data centre to the cloud. However, large cloud service providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and HP have now addressed the data residency issues in several jurisdictions by building local facilities. And several vendors, including Veritas, now provide toolsets to automate data replication and orchestrate workload migration. This is enabling businesses of all sizes, but particularly medium-sized ones, to consider cloud as a viable alternative to maintaining their own dedicated D.R. facilities, or to extend their D.R. provision to a broader range of production workloads, reducing both risk and cost.

2.  The beginning of the end for tape storage

The introduction of de-duplicating disk storage devices has already seen tape drives marginalised in many enterprise data centres, with tape storage used only for long term backup data retention. However, in 2017, businesses will finally begin to eliminate tape even for long term archiving. Businesses will now back up to the cloud for long term data retention. This will be driven by improving cloud storage economics, increased confidence in data security and the maturing of dedupe-to-the-cloud technologies. Tape management still costs businesses millions every year in transportation and storage costs, as well as expensive mechanical device maintenance. In 2017, we will see businesses free themselves from the shackles of tape storage, and enjoy cheaper and faster back up.

3.  GDPR will force enterprises to implement effective data management polices

May 2018 will see the introduction of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and businesses need to use 2017 to get prepared for complying with it. Businesses will need to be able to answer four challenging questions:

  • Do you have visibility and insight into the personal data you store?
  • Can you locate all of the information you hold on a data subject?
  • Can you supply that data to a requestor within a tight deadline?
  • Can you prove what you’re doing with that data and is it protected?

To be able to answer these questions will force businesses to embark on a long overdue data management journey, which in turn will result in additional benefits in terms of reduced data storage and management costs.

4.  Software defined storage hits the mainstream

As mentioned above, 2017 will see an 18 per cent increase in workloads running on scale-out, private cloud infrastructures. These new, hyper-scale environments demand a new cloud-scale approach to data storage that is poorly served by current SAN-attached monolithic storage subsystems. Throughout 2016, enterprises have been exploring new, scale-out, software-defined approaches to storage management and 2017 will see them put them into production. These solutions will enable enterprises to harness the power of commodity hardware – servers, SSDs and hard-disks – to deliver cost-effective, policy-based, high-performance storage services – and will even enable them to merge on-premise and public cloud storage pools.

5. Big data platforms become core repositories of Enterprise Master Data

In a move that surprised us this year, we had a number of customers ask about how to protect their Hadoop-based big data repositories. It seems that, with businesses running more analysis and uploading ever more data to these platforms, these platforms now bring so much value to the organisation that they are simply too critical to lose. Indeed, these big data platforms are now working as repositories of enterprise master data and if the data gets lost or corrupted, it’s not simply a problem of uploading the data again, it’s a business-critical issue.

So, these are my top 5 predictions for enterprise data management in 2017. What are your thoughts?  Please leave your comments below. Thanks!