Data volumes continue to grow exponentially, and there’s no end in sight. IDC predicts that the amount of commercial data in storage will be 12.8 ZB by 2026. A typical novel contains 1 MB of data and is about 12 mm thick, so 12.8 ZB of data in novelized form would create nearly 400,000 stacks of books, with each stack rising all the way to the moon.
Accessing this data and keeping it available for end-users is a critical capability for a modern business. When data is unavailable or worse, lost, the consequences can be dire: unhappy customers, lost revenue, even compliance or legal ramifications. Organizations need data resilience to ensure business continuity. Data is the lifeblood of modern business operations, which must be able to go on significant interruption in the face of accidental deletion, data corruption and systems failure. And in case of disaster — flood, fire, earthquake or ransomware — IT needs to be able to get the business back online with all of its data as quickly as possible.
Providing this level of resilience is a complex task, especially today, when data is stored in so many different places. Right now, according to IDC, just under half (49%) of data is stored in a traditional data center. The rest is stored in the cloud (29%), on the edge (19%) and a variety of other locations (4%). But even though the largest share of data is still in the data center, the momentum is clearly with the cloud and the edge. A slight majority of data already lives outside of the data center, and the day is not long off when it won’t even store the largest share of enterprise information. Compounding the complexity of enabling data resiliency and business continuity are the many different platforms (Unix, vSphere, Windows, Linux, etc.), data types (structured vs unstructured) and containerized environments a typical enterprise operates.
The upshot of all these environments, platforms and data types is that data becomes siloed, which means that each has its own storage and protection policies, and frequently different backup and disaster recovery systems. As a result, efforts get duplicated, creating inefficacy and higher costs. Even more concerning, these disparate siloes can create points of vulnerability, both from a security and business continuity perspective.
Cloud-based data protection can provide a solution for simplifying and strengthening resilience and business continuity thanks to a level of scale, economics and flexibility that is typically unattainable in a traditional on-premises environment Solutions include:
- Cloud as a target or tier
- Backup as a service (BaaS)
- Disaster Recovery as a service (Daas)
- Cyber Recovery as a service (CRaaS)
- Archive as a service (AaaS)
In collaboration with AWS, Commvault provides a broad set of cloud-based business continuity solutions that enable IT to protect data across silos to provide comprehensive, resilient data protection. AWS’s scale, redundant architecture and durability enables IT to failover applications and replicate data to locations throughout the world, which increases uptime, performance and business continuity. And Commvault optimizes cloud costs through deduplication, elastic resource provisioning and the use of native AWS APIs to accelerate recovery and migration of workloads.
Together, Commvault and AWS provide cloud-based solutions that break down data protection silos to enable comprehensive data resiliency and reliable business continuity.
To learn more read IDC’s white paper, Improving Data Resilience with a Cloud-first Approach
