According to IDC global data will grow 289% from 45 ZB (zettabytes) in 2019 to 175 ZB by 2025.

Data will grow 289% from 45 ZB (zettabytes) in 2019 to 175 ZB by 2025.

What do these numbers mean? A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes and to put that into context, if it were actually possible to download 175 ZB (and you had today’s largest available hard drive), you would need 12.5 billion drives!

We are producing more data in a single year than has been produced in the entire history of humanity and according to IDC, our data-driven world, which is always on, always tracking, always monitoring means that nearly 30% of the world’s data needs real-time processing.

Our data-driven world, which is always on, always tracking, always monitoring means that nearly 30% of the world’s data needs real-time processing.

Are you ready for this? Is your business ready?

Against the background of that data explosion you also need to consider that Cybercriminals continue to innovate, and their attacks become ever more sophisticated. According to Accenture whilst data breaches are increasingly expensive it’s actually the loss of data that accounts for 43% of those costs.

The impact of cyberattack is potentially huge for any organisation. The 2020 IBM Cost of a Data Breach report surveyed more than 500 companies and discovered the average cost of a breach for a small to medium sized enterprise (SME), is $2.5 million and takes an average of 280 days to identify and contain.

The average cost of a breach for a small to medium sized enterprise (SME), is $2.5 million and takes an average of 280 days to identify and contain.

An issue present in the IT industry is that many practitioners continue to piece together solutions and often end up reinventing the wheel at great cost (both in term of finances and time). SME’s can also make the mistake of assuming that the large industry leaders and their solutions are going to be cost prohibitive (or be too big for their requirements), in my experience that is simply not the case.

I have recently been working with IBM and their approach to cybersecurity and data management is a great antidote to this. They are making it simpler than ever to reduce the risk of disruption to business operations. The IBM FlashSystem 5000 storage provides advanced data protection capabilities, helping you to safeguard continuity, increase productivity and revenues, and hopefully gain competitive advantage.

Always create multiple lines of defence.

Best practice says that it is important to create multiple lines of defence. First, the IBM FlashSystem 5000 arrays support robust encryption of data at rest (both at hardware and software level) which helps guard against the threat of malware, hackers, and theft. In addition, their ‘IBM Spectrum Virtualize’ enables clients to extend the encryption across any other third-party hardware within your storage environment.

Data is fully encrypted to protect it when moving workloads from their arrays to the cloud and in the case of the IBM FlashSystem 5100 model (which is fitted with IBM FlashCore Modules), you can truly encrypt data without the risk of any impact on performance which impacts other vendors.

Resilience needs to be your next line of defence against potential disaster. The IBM FlashSystem 5000 does this with various features to ensure high availability and fast recovery. Firstly, each array maintains two copies of each data volume in case one version is temporarily unavailable to your application servers. Secondly, the high-performance systems support two or three data centre site architectures. It has built-in synchronous or asynchronous replication functionality allowing you to back up data to a secondary site and recover quickly should disaster hits.

You can also enable IBM HyperSwap which allows you to provision an ‘active-active configuration’ between sites, this would enable an immediate failover to a secondary location and keep data continuously available in the event of an outage at the primary data centre.

Alternatively, another strategy they support would be to take advantage of seamless connectivity to the cloud, you could then use cost-efficient public cloud storage for your disaster recovery. Otherwise, you could enable the IBM FlashSystem 5000 array FlashCopy function which creates point-in-time data snapshots, you can offload these onto tape using IBM Spectrum Protect and then store them offsite for your long-term retention.

What you get with the IBM FlashSystem 5000 storage is a multitude of security options in a very easy to consume and cost-effective model.

There will always multiple ways to combat the technological and compliance challenges we face with data, but what you get with the IBM FlashSystem 5000 storage is a multitude of security options in a very easy to consume and cost-effective model. You can find out more about their advanced data protection measures by visiting: ibm.com