Analysts & Influencers on Data Management

Welcome to the latest edition of the Komprise Intelligent Data Management newsletter! We cover new ways for IT managers to be more productive managing enterprise data and storage to dealing with ever-changing compliance issues, working with departments on data strategies and understanding the new requirements for data management and AI. Learn more about Komprise, a SaaS solution for unstructured data management and mobility here and follow us on LinkedIn.

This month’s newsletter covers what top storage and data management analysts and influencers are saying about key trends in the sector right now—across security, AI, sustainability and unstructured data management.

Unstructured Data Management

In Forbes, analyst Steve McDowell wrote about how unstructured data is “throttling nearly every enterprise's ability to leverage that data to competitive advantage.”

Organizations need to understand data for business effectiveness and to manage its storage costs; there is ample waste from storing redundant data or data that doesn’t require high performance storage. ?How to best manage unstructured data for these requirements, then?

McDowell writes: “There is plenty of hardware targeted at storing unstructured data. Storage solution vendors include Pure Storage, Dell Technologies, IBM, HPE, Lenovo, NetApp and VAST Data, among others. However, the hardware-based approach is inherently limited to the data the hardware directly controls, lowering the effectiveness of such systems in an enterprise where data is likely to be far more distributed. So a software-first solution is needed.

This year will see the broad adoption of sophisticated tools that bring new capabilities in cataloging and searching unstructured data across the breadth of an organization's hybrid-cloud infrastructure. Tools for managing unstructured data will rapidly evolve to include enterprise-class security, auditing and compliance features. In addition, these tools will help optimize underlying storage resources and assist in placing data close to the applications that use the data.”

Keep an eye on Komprise, a strong player in this space whose name you should know. IBM is another one to watch as it rapidly evolves its Spectrum Discover product. We should also see increased activity in understanding unstructured data from fast movers like VAST Data and Pure Storage. More traditional storage vendors like NetApp, HPE and Dell all talk about unstructured data, but none of these companies are rushing toward a solution that isn’t mapped directly to their existing storage technology.—Steve McDowell, NAND Research

AI and Data Storage

An exec from Western Digital talks about the impact of AI on storage, including data tiering and data classification, in Dataversity:

“AI/ML can provide the opportunity to fully automize tiered storage by analyzing access and usage patterns to intelligently allocate data to the optimal storage tier. And, because models are always learning, AI/ML will be able to adapt to changing conditions in real time – ultimately driving optimal price-per-performance capabilities.”

“Classification and tagging is another important yet manual task that offers opportunity for further automation. AI/ML can analyze the context of the data and the associated metadata to automatically categorize large volumes of information into neat, organized consumable units. The potential use cases for classification and tagging are intriguing – including commerce, content management, and any other process that relies on search functionality.”

Cybersecurity and Storage

These recommendations on purchasing cybersecurity-ready storage, a growing trend in the past year, come from the analyst firm DCIG:

“Our initial research into cyber secure high-end storage arrays reveals a dynamic market driven by the urgency to protect data and mitigate the ever-evolving cyber threat landscape. DCIG expects that innovative security features like ransomware detection and response with recovery assurance and automated forensic analysis will continue to shape the future of high-end storage. Every business and IT leader should incorporate cyber security features into their evaluation of storage solutions during the product selection process.”

Core features recommended by DCIG:

• Immutable Snapshots: These read-only copies of data provide a point-in-time view, allowing for rapid recovery to a clean state in case of ransomware attacks or accidental deletions.
• Ransomware Anomaly Detection: These features identify suspicious changes in data access patterns that could be indicative of ransomware encryption, allowing for early intervention. Some high-end arrays now embed these capabilities within the storage system, while others provide a cloud-based service to analyze data access patterns and identify anomalies that indicate a malware attack.
• Automated Compliance Monitoring and Alerting: Some of the high-end storage systems can automatically monitor compliance with relevant data security regulations and generate alerts for any discrepancies, streamlining the process for security teams.
• Near-instantaneous Recovery: Advanced storage solutions enable near-instantaneous recovery of data in the event of a cyberattack, minimizing downtime and ensuring business continuity.
• Granular Cyber Recovery at Scale: Some of these solutions enable administrators to pinpoint and recover specific files or objects affected by an attack, rather than restoring entire datasets, improving efficiency and minimizing recovery time.
• Fenced Network Forensic Environment: This secure, isolated environment facilitates forensic analysis of compromised data without contaminating other systems, aiding in identifying the source of an attack.
• Kubernetes Change Management Analysis: By analyzing deployments, builds, events, and alerts within Kubernetes environments, this feature automates the process of identifying the root cause of issues within complex containerized applications.
• Ransomware Recovery Assurance and Guarantee: Some advanced solutions offer guarantees for successful ransomware recovery, providing organizations with peace of mind and reducing the impact of attacks.
• Guided Disaster Protection Planning/Execution: High-end storage providers can guide administrators through the disaster protection planning process and facilitate disaster recovery processes, ensuring efficient and timely response to disruptions.

Sustainability

The age of greenwashing is ending. Many companies are finding that sustainability mandates are coming fast and sustainability efforts also help improve the bottom line. After all, energy efficiency means lower energy bills.

Our COO Krishna Subramanian, covered this topic in FastCompany recently: Can IT ignore going green any longer? Here are a few excerpts:

Power, cooling, and data center space are becoming more and more expensive. Energy costs continue to rise around the globe, which means higher costs for businesses to run daily operations. Older facilities and older technologies require more manpower to keep up and repair and they are less automated without self-healing capabilities. Maintaining the status quo will cost more over time than upgrading to smart, clean solutions.

When Gen Z and millennial customers believe a brand cares about its impact on people and the planet, they are 27% more likely to purchase it than older generations are, and the purchasing power of millennials and Gen Z will surpass that of boomers around the year 2030, according to?Harvard Business Review.?

Start with your data. This is the most valuable asset organizations have today—and the one that is growing fastest and consuming the most budget and resources to manage. Eliminating data waste by deleting unused, ex-employee, and duplicate data is a smart first step.? Most organizations have limited insights into how their data is used, much less how much they have. Using unstructured data management to understand these trends can help cut the fat.???

Finally, a recent Pure Storage blog dug deep into storage IT trends for sustainability:

On average, storage can account for 11% of the energy or roughly $3,300 per rack. To support this, companies will need to invest in heat removal technologies (which use power of their own) to avoid additional energy costs for cooling. Water is another vital resource that makes up the environmental footprint of a data center. A large data center can use between?one million and five million gallons of water per day—as much as a town of 50,000 people. With water availability likely to be degraded by climate change, organizations must also consider data center water usage when calculating their impact on the environment.”

An important step to achieving long-term sustainability is moving to?more efficient, all-flash data storage. Modern flash storage is engineered to be lower power, lower cooling, and lower waste. By transitioning from spinning disk to solid-state media, flash data center footprints can shrink dramatically.

Last Words…

We here at Komprise are bullish about the future of unstructured data management to deliver new possibilities for every sector--across AI, cost savings, compliance, sustainability and more. This requires careful governance, financial modeling and cost optimization strategies, and scrupulous internal policies and guardrails to protect data assets. ?

A word from our CEO Kumar Goswami:

"I’m very excited about our approach of providing one global search across data silos and the ability to enrich the metadata it contains through SDW and AI. It opens a host of data-driven management activities which were never possible until now. That’s the power of Komprise Intelligent Data Management and Deep Analytics. I look forward to hearing about your requirements, sharing more use cases with you and helping you bring structure to your unstructured data in 2024."

You can subscribe to our blog to receive new posts in your inbox and check out what's new by visiting our Resource Center.

https://www.komprise.com/resource/

Comment on the post or send a note to:

[email protected]