Data Backup Digest

The International Data Corporation predicts that data creation globally will reach 163 zettabytes by 2025. To put that into some sort of perspective, 1 zettabyte is equal to 1 billion terabytes or 1 trillion gigabytes. Yes, it’s a massive amount of data.

In the past, it only used to be large organisations that had to deal with lots of data. They also had sizeable IT teams to help support them with it. This is changing with how rapidly data is being produced. New regulations demand that more information must be stored, advanced technologies require greater capacities, and so on. Nowadays, even small to medium-sized businesses need a hefty storage capacity in order to deal with data demands.

ITProPortal conducted some research and found that 81 percent of IT decision makers were concerned about the risk of this data growth. Their main concern was financial, with an unease about the increased operational costs that will undoubtedly come with this. Besides, the more data there is, the more it costs to actually store it, protect it and maintain it. That’s why so many companies are now turning to cloud vendors to satisfy their storage, as they can’t keep up with the demands inhouse.

Not only is the amount of data being stored changing, but so too is the type of data. It’s predicted that 93 percent of digital data will be unstructured by 2022. Unstructured data means things like emails, texts, video files, PDFS – essentially, information that doesn’t slot into a fixed database with set columns. There’s now mass unpredictability to the data in type and size in a way that didn’t exist ten to twenty years ago.

Legacy infrastructure is thus unable to cope with this and not able to support effective management of the data. It goes beyond the physical storage of it, though of course that’s a concern too. It’s the fact that unstructured data is unpredictable and without limit. If an infrastructure can’t adapt and scale to this, the data is at risk.

If a business can’t scale its storage solution to react to data demands, that’s a problem. Object-based scale-out storage is a good solution for this. Using an object-based storage device gives the ability to add metadata to the file or create data objects which are defined by the metadata. For example, the metadata can cover retention, security, content and other information types that the storage system uses. This then means that the object can be found faster and automated, which is vital for large scale data storage.

The economy is being driven by data. Many businesses value themselves on the data they hold and the insight they can get from it. But if they don’t have the right solution in place to hold that data, they’ll quickly find themselves left behind. This is why it’s so important that every business, no matter their size or current IT infrastructure, closely looks at their current solutions to ensure that they can account for the huge amount of data that is hitting now and shows no signs of slowing down.