Secure data storage in a modern world
It won’t have escaped your notice that data volumes worldwide continue to grow – fast, and exponentially! Research from Statista has found that global data is expected to balloon from just over 64 zettabytes in 2020 to as much as 180ZB by 2025. A significant proportion of that data is ‘business data’ and not only has specific requirements for data storage and access, but is increasingly crucial to be secured against potential threats that could harm it or take control of it.
Whilst data is now becoming recognised as one of the most valuable resources in today’s business, data storage by comparison is often still viewed as a commodity by many businesses, where capacity and performance are often prioritised over the actual value that the data can deliver to the business. This approach, focused more on data storage or capacity management, overlooks the potential and opportunity that the data itself can have to drive new efficiencies, value and insights, which is also entirely possible without compromising the security of the data. Achieving this starts by gaining an understanding of the data itself.
The issues with traditional data storage
The way that data is used, stored and accessed is changing. It wasn’t so long ago that data resided in one location within a business – usually presented by server systems and data centres – and was accessed by users from that point. However, in today’s landscape, data is much more distributed across a wide range of locations and new environments, most notably in the cloud.
At the same time, data is playing a greater role in driving business value, insights and intelligence, including from unstructured data which can be much more challenging and time-consuming to leverage effectively. Equally new data sources and new uses of data, for example AI and data lakes, are driving new business value and adding an extended data landscape over more traditional business data and applications. And all this is taking place in a climate where threats like ransomware continue to grow, and accessibility for more flexible and mobile workforces remains essential to productivity and performance.
The result is that traditional security approaches are increasingly proving to be unfit for purpose in the modern business world. More data, more distributed data, greater cyberthreats and bigger demands for user accessibility are all playing their part. This means that new and important decisions have to be taken around additional layers of security, user access provisioning, and effective recovery strategies.
How SCC can help with secure data storage
It can be difficult to address these complex challenges in-house: how to protect against the biggest threats of today and tomorrow, how to ensure the right people can access the right data, and how to achieve those goals in the most cost-effective ways possible. And that’s where SCC, with nearly half a century’s experience supporting the technologies used by businesses just like yours, can be your perfect partner.
Our comprehensive data storage, management and security solutions cover all the bases, and can be tailored to your specific business needs, and the unique characteristics of the data you possess. The process starts with a full assessment of your current standing, with your security measures, infrastructure, and data; whether it resides on-premise, in the cloud or through a mixture of both.
Through this, we can identify areas for performance optimisation, security enhancement and better data storage, all without compromising business productivity or cost-effectiveness. The solutions we devise, deploy and manage based on this will then be subject to proof-of-value demonstrations, so that you can gain a full understanding of what our solutions deliver for you, how they meet your desired goals, and how they deliver a strong return on investment.
Find out more about our data storage solutions.
In summary
Expanding data volumes, rising security risks and new ways of working all mean a new approach to data storage is essential, if you haven’t already explored one. Understanding data and driving value from it should be at the core of your data strategy going forward, so that it becomes a business asset that is well worth protecting. An SCC data storage assessment is the best place to start on the journey towards that goal, and reaching the state where you can leverage secure, accessible, insightful data to grow your business with confidence.