Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
Managing and securing unstructured data and extracting value in 2021
By Edward M.L. Peters, Ph.D. Chief Innovation Officer at Panzura
Data quality, consistency and security are crucial in today’s markets. Regulatory compliance and maximising business benefits are no longer optional:
Data will continue to be processed closer to the edge source, near the physical location of people and devices, as IIoT, smart computing, and massively distributed workforces proliferate. For instance, cached memory inside on-prem environments and stored operations in cache are becoming a whole new way of computing where the server closest to the user will increasingly return the cached data-in many ways, it will be a re-emergence of cache. However, as cache is increasingly seen as less of a constraint and more of a resource to be utilized, IT leaders will need to consider how they can do more things in cache, and how their provisioning environment will change in fundamental ways.
The cost of storage will continue to drop. In the year ahead, we will see more and more that the amount of data-how many terabytes you have-will no longer dictate pricing, but instead there will be a shift toward pricing based on how data is actually used. In many ways, storage costs are following the same path of cloud providers, with the incumbent challenges around things like vendor lock and favorable services. This will require a new way of thinking about how we consume data in the enterprise.
Meanwhile the latest pandemic wave underscores vulnerability of cloud file systems. Remote work models have pushed firms to move to new cloud services as they look to maintain communications and collaboration. Hackers and cybercriminals have recognized the opportunity this expanded attack surface represents. Maximizing data protection, even for organizations that are not necessarily held to the strictest data protection, retention, and security regulations, is now front-and-center in the “new normal”.
Multi-cloud services platforms, for example global file systems, allow users to collaborate on both projects with ease, no matter where they are located inside or outside network boundaries. Handled right, they can help organizations manage the data explosion, and with it the shift to remote workforces, by transitioning the complex and costly traditional storage model to the cloud.
Most of these services are promoted as secure, but as ever, the weakest link in the fabric that transforms cloud storage into a global file system, is solutions that were not purpose-built for the cloud in the first place. Sharing large volumes of data in an untrusted cloud remains a challenge, and when catastrophic security failures occur, such as ransomware schemes and other near and present dangers, there is notoriously little a CISO can do, no matter how great their infrastructure is.
As a troubling second wave of the pandemic comes into view, the urgent need for cloud-native file solutions that can prevent external attacks and data loss from the cloud and unmanaged devices, and which do not add friction when working from home in support of the health and safety of the enterprise, is uncontested.
##
About the Author
Edward M.L. Peters, Ph.D. is Panzura’s Chief Innovation Officer. Panzura is the fabric that transforms cloud storage into a global file system, allowing enterprises to use the cloud as a high performance, globally available data center. Companies all around the world in the sports, healthcare, financial services, media and entertainment, gaming, and architectural, engineering and construction industries, as well as government agencies use Panzura’s fabric to manage hundreds of petabytes of data in the cloud. Visit panzura.com for more information.
