Hong Kong Computer Society - enterpriseinnovation.net

Enterprises face inadequate
data availability and security
IBM helps businesses rethink Information Infrastructure strategy with moves to
improve information access, management and data integrity
Hong Kong enterprises, like others in the
region, are facing escalating problems
in the management of data. For both large
and small organizations, current practices
are proving inadequate, raising the need
to rethink strategy in this area, observed
Douglas Lo, Storage & Mainframe Platform
Manager, Systems and Technology Group,
IBM China/Hong Kong Limited.
He notes that three major changes are
impacting data usage.
First, the volume of data stored by enterprises
has exceeded all expectations. Current
predictions indicate a compound annual
data growth rate of 57% until 2010. The
reasons for data growth include the growing
importance of IT systems to the economy,
but in particular the runaway success
of video for videoconferencing, corporate
education and training, and website information.
Graphics and audio files are also a
much higher proportion of enterprise data
throughput.
data. Many executives need to access
contractual details, customer records and
product specifications instantly to respond
to real-time market demands.
Enterprises need new strategy
“Current storage practices simply don’t
provide business users with the data they
need in a timely way,” said IBM’s Lo. According
to an IDC report (The Expanding
Digital Universe, March 2007), 52% of
managers don’t have confidence in their
enterprise data, while 59% admit to missing
vital information, and 42% have cases
where the wrong information was used.
Most enterprises today need to create
a new strategy to ensure that the kinds of
data essential to their business processes
are always available in a timely manner.
There is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ solution, because
the way enterprises utilize data varies
greatly. They will need an Information
Infrastructure strategy to meet the critical
needs around Information Compliance,
Information Availability, Information Retention
and Information Security (or CARS).
For backup and restore purposes, data
needs to be classified according to two
variables. First, how much data can you afford
to lose if the system goes down? Your
tape archive may be run weekly, or daily,
but that does not protect business users in
most cases. Any data created since the last
backup may be lost and will be unavailable.
“You have to consider your business need
and determine the interval between backups
on that basis,” Lo added. “The daily
archives of the past are likely to fall short
of requirements: hourly backups may make
more sense.”
Second, if data is lost for some reason,
how long can the business wait for restoration?
Increasingly, enterprises are recognizing
that data has to be available when it
is needed and the business world will not
wait for laggards.
Traditional tape archives are becoming
progressively less useful because, when
restoration is required from daily tape archives,
the restore time may be more than
Douglas Lo, IBM: There is no “one-size-fitsall”
solution, because the way enterprises
utilize data varies greatly.
Ordered chaos
All industries are affected by the data
surge, but the areas in which data management
within the hour, or even 15 minutes, depending
on the nature of the business.
has already become an acute
problem include business intelligence, the
media and entertainment industries and the
healthcare sector.
Second, 80% of data is now unstructured
from different media such as emails, file
sharing, audio and video files. Each enterprise
may need to use, and therefore
to store and retrieve, such information in
a way that useful to its business processes.
In addition, all industries are subject
compliance requirements which include
higher standards of data discovery in legal
proceedings. Emails are expected to be
archived and in the finance industry, compliance
requirements may be tougher and
include voice recordings, especially where
these have contractual content.
Third, is the acceleration of decisionmaking
processes. Real-time trading and
Internet mediated supply chains are setting
the pace for rapid management decisions,
which in turn demand instant availability
of relevant and accurate decision support a day. Restoration is increasingly needed
Data duplication problem
Data exchanged with business partners
in high-speed supply chains must
be right up to date and quickly available.
For this kind of service a ‘snapshot’
backup system is needed. For example,
IBM FlashCopy function, can do instant
backups at intervals and restore data
within minutes.
Automatic Tape Libraries, which access
and change cassettes as necessary, can
provide disaster recovery if they are located
at premises separate from the production
site. But tape performance is inherently
limited, these systems are now challenged
by Virtual Tape Libraries that use disks to
emulate tape archiving procedures, but can
provide much faster writing and restore performance.
If these are equipped with snapshot
capability, data protection is vastly
improved.
One of the biggest issues with storage
efficiency is the data duplication involved.
14 Computerworld Hong Kong Nov 2009 www.cw.com.hk