By Paul Bruton, ‎Business Director – Data Intelligence of
Hitachi Vantara

The noted futurist and author, Alvin
Toffler, famously described technology as the “great
growling engine of change.” He was right. And, in today’s fast-paced and increasingly
complex business environment, it is growling more loudly than ever!

Simply maintaining the status quo is no longer
enough. Corporate IT is under immense pressure to deliver file services
solutions that go beyond the basic functions legacy network-attached storage (NAS)
platforms have to offer.

This is
complicated by a host of variables, including worker mobility. According to
Gartner 28% of corporate data already resides exclusively on laptops,
smartphones and tablets. The challenge for any organization is gaining control
and visibility of these data sets to govern and manage them in line with
corporate policy. Add to this Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) deployments,
compliance requirements, metadata-driven policy management, collaboration and affinity
for cloud architectures, and you begin to understand the intricacies involved.

On top of
all that is the increasing threat from cyber-attacks. According to Trend Micro Incorporated, out of the 82 million ransomware threats blocked
in the first half of this year, those targeting APAC entities accounted for 36%
of all attacks, the highest of all regions.

It is no
wonder that enterprises need a modernized file services solution capable of
meeting today’s challenges and tomorrow’s opportunities.

Creating all this data is an expensive
proposition, but it’s nothing compared to the total cost of ownership over time,
which puts a tremendous strain on IT teams.

The annual costs for traditional backup are
becoming untenable. Traditional infrastructure also requires the labor-intensive
management of file servers and NAS appliances for things like protection,
performance, migrations, capacity planning, which makes it very costly to
maintain.

According to Veritas,
in an average ten petabyte environment, 41% of data is stale – meaning it has
not been modified or touched in the past three years – and organizations are spending
over US$20 million per year just to manage this data!

When you
factor in the cost of protecting this data with traditional backup solutions,
which in APAC is in the order of US$4,000-8,000 per terabyte, it’s clear that
the operational and financial challenges of continuing with these aging
technologies will have a significant impact on the organization.

The reality
is that, unless these challenges are addressed now, they will become the
dominant cost category within the total IT financial picture.

Solving
this file serving problem is the catalyst for moving to a modern architecture. Corporate
IT needs to be able to deliver file services solutions that push beyond their
legacy NAS platforms if they are to deliver on the promises of digital
transformation.

What’s
needed is a “next generation NAS” capable of meeting the business’ needs while
reducing complexity and costs. Do achieve this, many organization are leveraging
a secure object store, to significantly lower the total cost of ownership of their
File Services.

The cost
saving from object storage comes from its next-generation cloud based
architectures – that automate integrity checking and self-healing, removing the
need for traditional backup. It can also scale seamlessly and automatically
replicate off-site and enables users to leverage off-the-shelf hardware to
scale to hundreds of petabytes in an easily managed environment, while securing
their corporate data.  Add to this the
ability to reduce physical capacity requirements by 40-50% with global
deduplication and compression, and object storage becomes a compelling option
to modernize how organizations control unstructured data growth.

To access the
agility, as well as the operational efficiency, required to survive in today’s
markets, businesses need to leverage as many enablers as possible. And, with so
much enterprise data residing as unstructured data, that means organizations must
modernize their corporate file services and build a holistic data strategy.

Solutions
like the Hitachi Content Platform are the ideal object stores on which to build
the right data foundation. It not only offers all the advantages of a
simplified datacenter, it also enables users to deliver on four key business
enablers:

Hitachi
Vantara’s object storage solution also allows users to orchestrate the movement
of data to public clouds, cost-effectively and automatically, whilst maintaining
control of data security.  It also has the
ability to securely connect laptops, desktops and mobile devices for enterprise
file sync & share. Object storage can also be extended to remote &
branch offices, VDI & non-VDI environments, with built-in multi-tenant data
management and governance.

What’s
more, this system is integrated into the unique Hitachi Content Intelligence
engine – a powerful tool for analyzing, aggregating and indexing data from
almost any source.

Ultimately,
the equation is simple. Adopting a holistic approach to data management addresses
the challenges of exploring and discovering relevant, valuable, and factual
information across siloed repositories. This is data intelligence!

It enables
organizations to explore structured and unstructured data, regardless of where
it resides, using comprehensive natural-language search, real-time analytics,
and automated indexing to ensure relevant business insights are surfaced
quickly and are actionable.

The content can then be transformed, searched,
governed and mobilized. As it goes through this process, the “data” is
transformed to “information” which then can be used by consumers – such as
employees, or distributed to remote users, offices or devices and fed into
analytics tools.

In the end,
that is the best way for modern organizations to keep the growling that Toffler
mentioned down to manageable levels, and achieve their digital transformation
goals.