How do I select a data storage solution for my business?
We live in the age of data. We are constantly producing it, analyzing it, figuring out how to store and protect it, and, hopefully, using it to refine business practices. Unfortunately, 58% of organizations make decisions based on outdated data.
While enterprises are rapidly deploying technologies for real-time analytics, machine learning and IoT, they are still utilizing legacy storage solutions that are not designed for such data-intensive workloads.
To select a suitable data storage for your business, you need to think about a variety of factors. We’ve talked to several industry leaders to get their insight on the topic.
Phil Bullinger, SVP and General Manager, Data Center Business Unit, Western Digital
Selecting the right data storage solution for your enterprise requires evaluating and balancing many factors. The most important is aligning the performance and capabilities of the storage system with your critical workloads and their specific bandwidth, application latency and data availability requirements. For example, if your business wants to gain greater insight and value from data through AI, your storage system should be designed to support the accelerated performance and scale requirements of analytics workloads.
Storage systems that maximize the performance potential of solid state drives (SSDs) and the efficiency and scalability of hard disk drives (HDDs) provide the flexibility and configurability to meet a wide range of application workloads.
Your applications should also drive the essential architecture of your storage system, whether directly connected or networked, whether required to store and deliver data as blocks, files, objects or all three, and whether the storage system must efficiently support a wide range of workloads while prioritizing the performance of the most demanding applications.
Consideration should be given to your overall IT data management architecture to support the scalability, data protection, and business continuity assurance required for your enterprise, spanning from core data centers to those distributed at or near the edge and endpoints of your enterprise operations, and integration with your cloud-resident applications, compute and data storage services and resources.
Ben Gitenstein, VP of Product Management, Qumulo
When searching for the right data storage solution to support your organizational needs today and in the future, it’s important to select a solution that is trusted, scalable to secure demanding workloads of any size, and ensures optimal performance of applications and workloads both on premises and in complex, multi- cloud environments.
With the recent pandemic, organizations are digitally transforming faster than ever before, and leveraging the cloud to conduct business. This makes it more important than ever that your storage solution has built in tools for data management across this ecosystem.
When evaluating storage options, be sure to do your homework and ask the right questions. Is it a trusted provider? Would it integrate well within my existing technology infrastructure? Your storage solution should be easy to manage and meet the scale, performance and cloud requirements for any data environment and across multi-cloud environments.
Also, be sure the storage solution gives IT control in how they manage storage capacity needs and delivers real-time insight into analytics and usage patterns so they can make smart storage allocation decisions and maximize an organizations’ storage budget.
David Huskisson, Senior Solutions Manager, Pure Storage
Data backup and disaster recovery features are critically important when selecting a storage solution for your business, as now no organization is immune to ransomware attacks. When systems go down, they need to be recovered as quickly and safely as possibly.
Look for solutions that offer simplicity in management, can ensure backups are viable even when admin credentials are compromised, and can be restored quickly enough to greatly reduce major organizational or financial impact.
Storage solutions that are purpose-built to handle unstructured data are a strong place to start. By definition, unstructured data means unpredictable data that can take any form, size or shape, and can be accessed in any pattern. These capabilities can accelerate small, large, random or sequential data, and consolidate a wide range of workloads on a unified fast file and object storage platform. It should maintain its performance even as the amount of data grows.
If you have an existing backup product, you don’t need to rip and replace it. There are storage platforms with robust integrations that work seamlessly with existing solutions and offer a wide range of data-protection architectures so you can ensure business continuity amid changes.
Tunio Zafer, CEO, pCloud
Bear in mind: your security team needs to assist. Answer these questions to find the right solution: Do you need ‘cold’ storage or cloud storage? If you’re looking to only store files for backup, you need a cloud backup service. If you’re looking to store, edit and share, go for cloud storage. Where are their storage servers located? If your business is located in Europe, the safest choice is a storage service based in Europe.
Best case scenario – your company is going to grow. Look for a storage service that offers scalability. What is their data privacy policy? Research whether someone can legally access your data without your knowledge or consent. Switzerland has one of the strictest data privacy laws globally, so choosing a Swiss-based service is a safe bet. How is your data secured? Look for a service that offers robust encryption in-transit and at-rest.
Client-side encryption means that your data is secured on your device and is transferred already encrypted. What is their support package? At some point, you’re going to need help. A data storage service with a support package that’s included for free, answers in up to 24 hours is preferred.