15 minute read
UNLOCKING THE FUTURE
THE FUTURE OF STORAGE RESIDES AT THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDGE AND CLOUD, SAYS OSSAMA SAMADONI, SR. SALES DIRECTOR – MERAT, DELL TECHNOLOGIES
Information is the lifeblood of companies and in this new data era, the combination of massive amounts of data and unparalleled technology innovation, has given businesses of all sizes the opportunity to become disruptive, digital powerhouses. Data has become more diverse than ever before – and is now being created, processed, and stored everywhere, from edge to cloud.
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“Data is a precious thing”
Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web said, “Data is a precious thing and will last longer than the systems themselves.” Today, data is increasingly generated and consumed across a geographically distributed and mobile infrastructure of people, processes, and tools. As every aspect of our lives and business goes online, organisations are rapidly transforming how, and where business happens. The edge increasingly is where data is being created with Gartner estimating that 75% of the data will be generated and processed at the edge.
Edge represents an incredible opportunity for organisations as they digitise business processes, and extract value from all the data they collect from their operations. It also represents new challenges as organisations must find a way to gain real-time insights across a massively distributed set of devices, with large data volumes in a cost-effective manner. Attempting to manage this growth and data with traditional storage technology – where data is moved to and processed in centralised data centers comes with challenges such as: • Increasing latency: Sending data from edge devices to a data center and back significantly increases latency, which is unacceptable in use cases like self-driving cars where a milli-second delay in response can be dangerous. • Reliability issues: Enterprises may not be able to count on mission-critical
or time-critical applications because of latency and bandwidth issues. • Rising costs: Moving massive amounts of data at high speed can quickly increase expenses. • Lack of bandwidth: There simply may not be enough bandwidth to handle the sheer volume of data generated by edge resources. • Increasing risks: The growing amount of data sent between edge devices and data center locations increases the attack surface.
Workload autonomy
Most organisations have found that no single infrastructure can address all their data requirements, so they utilise different architectures, creating siloes of IT resources that are managed and consumed independently. At the same time, IT is under increasing pressure to deliver greater levels of simplicity and agility on the business side.
In order to manage data generated by edge environments more efficiently, enterprise-grade, on-premise storage must now provide the same operational flexibility as cloud, becoming ever more adaptable, automated and easier to integrate with existing management frameworks. By landing storage and cloud capabilities out at the edge, organisations have more latitude to decide where a specific workload is best processed.
But this brings us to the real question. What are some of the enterprise data storage practices that would help unlock the real value of data capital at the edge?
Edgier technology for tomorrow’s leaders
Firstly, the digital leaders of the future can’t be built on the technology approaches of the past – IT needs to evolve to provide a technology foundation that accelerates digital innovation. Today’s storage infrastructure technology is designed to make hybrid cloud environments and data produced at the edge, easier to deploy and manage. These purpose-built suites of solutions, have evolved to fill an essential role in the data centre, providing everexpanding levels of performance, capacity, and resiliency for missioncritical workloads. Modern storage architecture is helping businesses succeed, by not only supporting current business needs, but also allowing scale to evolve IT infrastructure as business dynamics change.
Therefore, organisations must refresh their storage infrastructure on a regular basis and keep up with the increased data demands by eliminating aging infrastructure that is more susceptible to failures that cause outages/downtime. Modern storage infrastructure also frequently includes advanced data protection features that help ensure the on-premises data remains safe and secure. Data encryption adds an additional layer of protection to this, improving data security and mitigating the potential for data loss.
Blurring storage and cloud roles
Next, against the backdrop of post pandemic recovery and the volume of data being generated from the edge, one thing is clear. The lines between storage and cloud are blurring as organisations demand agility and simplicity for business-critical IT infrastructure to respond to changing market dynamics. According to a recent report from Coherent Market Insights, the GCC and Levant’s data storage market is set to reach a record-high of $8.5 billion by 2027, nearly tripling from $2.9 billion in 2019. In order to manage and process high volumes of data, enterprises are transitioning from multi-cloud architecture to hybrid cloud storage that leverage the power of cloud for their edge environments. This is because hybrid cloud data storage technology provides the flexibility and resiliency that enterprises need for evolving workloads.
To conclude, the premise is simple. The edge is a key element of the future of computing and data storage and cloud are intrinsically linked to that. To effectively ride the data waves, organisations must modernise their data centres and embrace intelligent and adaptable, enterprise cloud storage infrastructure. The organisations that do, will be prepared to manage the deluge of data that’s already here.
DEALING WITH DATA
GREGG PETERSEN, REGIONAL DIRECTOR FOR THE MEA REGION, COHESITY, ON WHY DATA MANAGEMENT IS KEY IN TODAY’S DIGITAL ECONOMY.
Can you tell us how this pandemic has changed backup and recovery strategies of enterprises in the region?
Even before the pandemic, data fragmentation had become an issue with between 4-10 copies of each piece of data in any ME organisation. It’s in part due to the way IT solutions have been purchased over the years here.
Data has exploded in volume and become scattered across multiple public clouds, data centres, remote offices, and the edge, with little global oversight. In each of these locations, data has become isolated in specialised infrastructure, often from multiple vendors, to manage basic functions such as backup, networking, storage, archiving, disaster recovery, dev/ test, and analytics. As a result, businesses are losing control of data and the copies they have in deep silos.
The pandemic created an additional layer of complexity to backing up and managing data instead of moving in the other direction towards a more simple, efficient, streamlined backup and data management environment. There were colocation providers having to ask customers to ‘check-in’ like a hotel to visit their hardware, and for some they simply weren’t allowed to visit datacentres to perform tasks. This has really put an emphasis on managed services and cloud. But even with these scenarios the issues of fragmented data can still exist and manifest quicker still.
Customers have seen these trends and have now very quickly realised that it’s time to look at modern next-gen data management vendors. This new breed of vendor can provide a single platform to backup their modern data and give them oversight in one platform to manage this data no matter where the workforce is.
Consolidating the data onto a single platform that can manage the backups, NAS, Object storage, dev and test, analytics all in one single interface is what customers are seeing and expecting from
their vendors now. There should be no limitation of data, apps, databases and location when being able to backup this data. The days of the legacy-style ‘onetrick-ponies’ is over for businesses with an eye on the future.
How are you helping your customers to defend against ransomware attacks?
We have baked into the foundation of Cohesity technology something called SpanFSTM, an immutable file system. Cohesity SpanFS stores all the backed-up data in internal Cohesity Views that are inaccessible from outside of a Cohesity cluster. This in itself provides protection, but given the backup snapshots are stored in a read-only state, which means that no external application or unauthorised user can modify the snapshot. This is hugely significant and is a gamechanger in the fight against an attacker.
Any attempts to write to an immutable backup snapshot, are marked read-only upon completion of each Protection job running. For additional security, Cohesity views include DataLock, Cohesity’s Write Once Read Many (WORM) feature. If DataLock is enabled, the backup snapshot cannot be deleted by anyone, including administrators, until the DataLock expires.
We also have two other features - a neat Cohesity Helios mobile phone app that provides visibility remotely and on the go, and can be used in conjunction with alerts to notify an IT team member of unusual behaviours or issues beginning to arise. It’s not fail safe, but it is an early-warning feature that might just help you lockdown a system and stop an attacker in their tracks once they are in your system.
Finally Cohesity CyberScan is an app on our Marketplace. By scanning backup copies on Cohesity Helios instead of the risk of doing so on the live production copy, you can get more return on investment from your backups, and safely identify any vulnerabilities across an organisation’s IT environment, including the operating system, computer, network devices, and configurations. The application gives a global view of all vulnerabilities through an easy-to-read security dashboard along with actionable recommendations. These recommendations are supplemented with the highest CVE coverage, knowledge from Tenable’s extensive intelligence, and plugins on how to address exposures before hackers exploit them.
We are having a lot of conversations about ransomware recovery right now as a compliment to the front-end security offered by traditional cybersecurity vendors. CyberScan is particularly neat because it gives peace of mind and ensures that known vulnerabilities do not get re-injected into the production environment during restores - something not all our rivals can provide.
Cybercriminals are now targeting backup data. How can users mitigate these threats?
The fact is, most backup products were designed before ransomware became a popular way of stealing personal and business data. Their architecture of media servers, media agents, storage repositories, and resulting data sprawl make them vulnerable to today’s exploits. Cybercriminals have been targeting backup data for over two years now, and during that time we’ve seen the threat evolve from backups stored on-premises to those stored in the cloud. That’s why businesses need to look at next-gen backup systems which are architected differently than those of the past. At Cohesity, our backup and recovery solution defends data against ransomware attacks better because of immutability built into our system. This provides backup copies that cannot be modified, encrypted, or deleted. With our modern, multicloud data management architecture featuring immutable, anti-ransomware technology, Cohesity customer’s backups are protected from cybercriminals as they attempt to strike and remove that last line of hope - the backup. And, that’s been a game changer for us - the more attacks happen, the more the message around immutability in the architecture becomes more widely understood.
Do you see demand for backup as a service in the region?
Absolutely. Our Backup as a Service offering is currently available on the Frankfurt and London AWS regions for EMEA organisations, but we’ve already closed our first deal in the Middle East. We hope to expand our customer base for DataProtect delivered as a Service rapidly and we intend to release more offerings across our Data Management as a Service platform between now and the end of the year. With most hyperscalers having announced a local presence or already having a local presence, we see this demand growing exponentially.
CYBERCRIMINALS HAVE BEEN TARGETING BACKUP DATA FOR OVER TWO YEARS NOW, AND DURING THAT TIME WE’VE SEEN THE THREAT EVOLVE FROM BACKUPS STORED ON-PREMISES TO THOSE STORED IN THE CLOUD. THAT’S WHY BUSINESSES NEED TO LOOK AT NEXT-GEN BACKUP SYSTEMS WHICH ARE ARCHITECTED DIFFERENTLY THAN THOSE OF THE PAST.
NAVIGATING CLOUD
AHMED ADLY, ORACLE’S SENIOR DIRECTOR FOR CLOUD ENGINEERING, TALKS ABOUT HOW THE COMPANY IS TAILORING ITS APPROACH TO ENSURE THAT CUSTOMERS CAN BUILD THE CLOUD ENVIRONMENTS THEY WANT.
Can you give us an update about your strategy since the opening of Oracle’s public cloud region in Dubai last year?
It was a significant step for us as it enabled both large and small enterprises to make the long-awaited move to the cloud. Now, they can comply with local regulations and address the challenges of network latency and bandwidth with a regional cloud data centre. However, we did not stop there as we are now opening our second data centre in the UAE later this year. We believe it will be as important as the first cloud region because customers are looking to have their production environment and DR site to be in the same country, following the same regulations. We are also expanding in Saudi Arabia and South Africa, so MEA is a big focus for us.
The second area of our strategy is focused on providing flexible options to our customers to migrate to the cloud. We are bringing our cloud technology into specific customer environments because some large enterprises do not want to move to the public cloud because they want data behind their firewalls. Previously, some vendors have tried to provide customised versions of the cloud technology to their customers, but that didn’t work well. So what we are doing is bringing the exact copy of the architecture and blueprint of our public cloud region and making it available to customers to deploy it within their data centres. We recently signed up a mega project with the Oman government to build their G-cloud, using our dedicated region Cloud@Customer technology. This is in line with our strategy to provide our customers with tight control over data sovereignty and governance.
Are you bringing public cloud capabilities into private data centres with Cloud@Customer?
Exactly. We understand the challenges of some of our customers – they believe in the value proposition of the cloud in terms of cost benefits, flexibility, scale, etc. However, they are concerned about their data security; they don’t want their data to leave the country or outside their firewalls. And some of them are operating in highly regulated industries with stringent compliance requirements. We are not turning our back on them, so we have taken the same technology we are using in our cloud and packaged it to run in their data centres. We run it in the same way as we run our cloud, meaning we do the installation, configuration, patching, upgrade, and everything you can think of to have a fully operational cloud environment in the customer data centre.
What’s more, we also offer it as a payas-you-go model to lower costs. If you look at the other major cloud players in the market, you have no choice but to go to their data centres. We are the only cloud provider that offers this flexible cloud option to customers.
This pandemic has accelerated cloud adoption globally. Do you see that reflecting in the Middle East?
Though the pandemic disrupted our lives and economy, it accelerated cloud adoption in the region. I can tell you what CIOs here have been doing over the last one and half years. Those who believed in the value of the cloud but were reluctant to move were pushed by the pandemic to migrate to the cloud. Even those who didn’t have planned budgets for the cloud reallocated it from other projects to make the leap. This was mainly because of a couple of reasons. First, during the lockdown, when their engineers could not reach data centres the cloud turned out to be the better option. Second, you must have heard about the global semiconductor shortage, and IT chiefs don’t have to worry about having access to hardware because cloud providers offer the capacity they need. Third, enterprises need new ways to interact with IT infrastructure, and CIOs now understand they need to serve the business differently because the old ways are not working. The cloud is the best medium that can help accelerate their digital transformation plans. I’d spoken to a CIO recently, and before the pandemic, he was thinking of adopting IaaS and lift-andshift some workloads to the cloud. But, he was pushed by the pressure of the pandemic to move to the cloud and realized he could access 60 plus services on his cloud platform, which can be used to work on so many projects in ways he’d never imagined before. That is the kind of positive impact that this pandemic had on cloud transformation.
https://cxoinsightme.com/ictleadershipawards/2021/
Conrad Hotel, Dubai 17 OCTOBER 2021
The Middle East is a bubbling cauldron of tech innovation. The pace of digital transformation in the region is accelerating in the wake of the pandemic with the rapid adoption of digital technologies. ICT Leadership Awards 2021, taking place on 17th October 2021, will recognise companies and individuals in the Middle East whose ICT practice has led to innovation and business resiliency during this pandemic.
Chosen by CXO Insight Middle East editors, we will spotlight organisations that are making smart business decisions with emerging technologies and the whole ecosystem that is fueling the growth of the ICT sector in the region. Be part of this awards programme that celebrates technology leaders from a broad range of organisations for their exemplary leadership and innovative approaches and tools and platforms these visionaries are tapping into to solve their business problems.
For the first time, we will also be recognising the achievements of B2B technology marketing managers who have made significant contributions to the success of their businesses and helped their brands to rise above the noise in a fast-paced market.
