FEATURE : DISASTER RECOVERY AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY
With ongoing data growth , many organizations are silently choosing not to replicate storage that contains less critical data – a dangerous strategy that creates a gap in the event of a disaster .
What about broader ransomware protection ?
A challenge with NAS mirroring is that although it provides near instant recovery , it does not really protect from cyberattacks because changes are propagated to both sites at nearly the same time .
Krishna Subramanian , Komprise co-founder and COO
What ’ s needed is a more affordable DR strategy which allows organizations to pick different levels of replication to non-identical destinations like the cloud based on the criticality of data .
This tiered strategy allows all data to be replicated but not with the same level of performance and in the same type of storage .
Also , this replication can be asynchronous with a delay of when changes get propagated to offer some protection from a ransomware attack .
How and when does unstructured data management come to play ?
The first responsibility is to understand your data with visibility across all storage vendors – from on-premises to edge to the cloud .
While this synchronous replication ensures a nearinstantaneous Recovery Point Objective ( RPO ), its drawback is that a ransomware infection in the primary site will also infect the secondary site .
So , with asynchronous replication , you can create a buffer that mitigates the issues with data being replicated at nearly the same time .
Another strategy is to tier cold data from expensive storage and backups into a resilient destination such as object-locked storage in the cloud .
By moving cold data to object-locked storage and eliminating it from active storage and backups , you can create a logically isolated recovery copy which is immutable , to prevent deletion or alteration . This will also drastically cut storage and backup costs – by 70 % or more – because this lower-performing , lower cost storage tier is not designed for rapid recovery .
Is there a role for AI to play here ?
Many enterprises don ’ t know how much data they have nor how fast it is growing company-wide and at the department level . They don ’ t have clear insights into file types and sizes or usage patterns – such as how much of their data is rarely used or where their PII and financial data is located .
Yes . The power of AI is that it can very quickly scan petabytes of data – or billions of files – to find specific data sets .
AI tools such as Amazon Macie can help if integrated with an unstructured data management workflow .
Employees unwittingly copy sensitive data to incompliant locations .
An unstructured data management solution can index all your data in storage so that IT can see these trends and make better decisions for right-placing it . This ensures that you ’ re not overspending to protect lesscritical or cold data .
With this knowledge , you can then look for a solution that can asynchronously replicate data at the share level . This means you can pick which shares you want to replicate , to where and on what schedule .
You can configure different policies for different shares in the same volume and you can create a tiered DR program that doesn ’ t leave gaps for ransomware and hackers in general .
The AI tool can scan the content of files for sensitive data ( such as customer contact information or credit cards ) and then tag those files as containing PII .
IT can use the output of the AI scan in the unstructured data management system to then segregate and move those data sets to a secure storage location where they can ’ t be copied or moved elsewhere in violation of corporate policy and industry regulations .
You can feasibly create an automated policy and workflow for this process to happen continuously . That way , you can be assured of which data sets require the highest level of protection – including DR . Right-sizing DR and data protection is becoming mission critical today ; we simply can ’ t afford to treat all data the same , but we can protect all data at the level it needs to assure a holistic DR and security strategy . p
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