Find the right data storage solution and protect your business

• Data contains valuable business information that can help your organization achieve its goals.
• Threats to data availability come from many sources, from cyber attacks to user errors.
• Make sure you go with a storage solution that will not only grow with your business, but protect your data every step of the way.

“Data is the lifeblood of your business, and there is no business process that is not dependent on data.” These are the words of Stuart Thomson, IBM’s global storage marketing manager. As such, it is essential that businesses optimize and protect this vital resource.

Your data must be accessible and available

Data begins to accumulate from day one of operations – and as a business matures, its data grows with it. Analyzing data can give businesses greater insight into operations, customers, and more, enabling leaders to make more informed and strategic business decisions.

“But the growth of data also brings increasing complexity that can quickly become a challenge to manage,” said Thomson. “If organizations don’t take a thoughtful and strategic approach to managing their information, data can easily become siled across different departments and systems, hampering the ability to capitalize on information because the whole is difficult to capture. see, ”he added.

“For example, if marketing creates one dataset, then sales creates a different dataset, and the customer data ends up in disparate systems, you lose the opportunity to leverage the insights from that data. It can be the difference between winning and losing. This added complexity also introduces an increased risk to data security, ”said Thomson.

That’s why it’s essential to have an information infrastructure that makes it easy to keep your data accessible, available and protected. And the right storage solution can help you do just that.

Data can be attacked by the most unlikely sources

Businesses of all sizes own and share sensitive information that must be managed to function. This makes every organization, from startups to businesses, vulnerable to cyber attacks and hacking threats from malicious actors around the world. “It’s not a question of whether the bad guys will come in, it’s more about when,” said Thomson.

“While cyber attacks are clearly on the rise, threats to data availability take more forms than simple targeted attacks,” added Thomson. “Floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and most often user error: Employees simply click on the wrong thing to expose a vulnerability and unintentionally reveal data. “

Small businesses can be particularly vulnerable to data breaches simply because they lack the breadth and depth of IT resources that large organizations enjoy. Often, one or two people simultaneously serve as application experts, security experts, storage administrators, and server experts. In these environments, it is essential to focus on tools that not only simplify management, but also data protection.

“There is no one-size-fits-all solution to protect against all of the various threats to data availability. Businesses need a range of capabilities to quickly protect and recover data from any form of destructive event, ”said Thomson.

The right data storage solution can help protect your business

IBM FlashSystem® is a family of high-performance, all-flash and hybrid data storage solutions that provide extensive data high availability and resiliency features.

“FlashSystem offers a multi-layered approach to data resiliency, and one of those features is replication across two or three sites,” said Thomson. “For example, if my primary storage location is in an earthquake-prone location, like California, I can replicate my data to another safe location. If that storage goes offline, Access may fail over automatically. to the secondary site With HyperSwap, IBM offers a 100% data availability guarantee.

IBM FlashSystem also incorporates many additional protections, including encryption and immutable, isolated copies of data that remain in the same system so that it can be quickly restored to support recovery, minimizing the impact of a cyber attack.

In addition, IBM FlashSystem is designed with a “one platform” design, which means that while each member has unique performance and capacity characteristics, the FlashSystem family shares a common architecture and management system, with same APIs and management protocols. Opting for a single platform solution reduces the complexity caused by data growth. Your IT team doesn’t need to learn new interfaces and approaches when it’s time to move to a new system, and the consistent software foundation on each model facilitates scalability as your workloads and business needs grow. data evolves.

A hybrid cloud approach ready for the future

Another factor to look for when choosing data storage is its ability to support hybrid cloud deployments. The decision of where to deploy workloads can be based on many factors. Could working with a cloud provider bring more efficiency, speed and agility? Is the deployed application critical and therefore should it be kept onsite? Given these variables, there is no single answer. Most organizations choose a hybrid approach: some workloads stay on-premises while others are deployed in the cloud

IBM FlashSystem enables IT organizations to easily and transparently adopt hybrid cloud with confidence. By using a common interface for on-premises storage and data storage on major cloud vendor platforms, IBM ensures data mobility and a single, cost-effective management approach to store, manage and protect data on-premises. Hybrid cloud infrastructures with ease and without vendor lock-in. in.

“It’s easy for storage administrators to look at their data storage holistically and choose what to keep on-premises and what to move to the cloud,” said Thomson. “We wanted to make it as easy as possible for them to adopt hybrid cloud. ”

Getting an advantage over the competition is easier with a good data strategy

Choosing the right data storage option for your business can make all the difference. “If you have the right data strategy, it can allow you to outsmart your competition,” said Thomson.

The right solution is one that helps you learn from your data and feed it back into your business strategy. To get this information, businesses need uninterrupted access to data. “The last thing you want is for a critical application to crash because your storage has failed,” Thomson said.

For small businesses, always being active is essential for the growth and development of customer confidence. IBM FlashSystem is the best way to ensure that no matter what as your business grows, you can rely on your data.

Find out how IBM’s FlashSystem can help your business.

This post was created by Insider Studios with IBM.