The shift to telecommuting has accelerated digitization, making businesses more data hungry but making it harder to protect them. The capacities of many traditional backup solutions are very often exceeded due to the volumes of data created in a day.
Data files in certain sectors such as healthcare, financial services, research or even media and entertainment are often unique and irreplaceable, leading to high stakes. This data can take the form of a camera sequence, a table, an intellectual property, or a medical image.
Any failure or attack against file data can have serious consequences. To mitigate these risks, we encourage enterprises to consider a three-pronged approach to backup and secure file data at scale.
How to backup and protect file data at scale
Below are three best practices and solutions to take into account for large-scale file data backup and security.
1. Adopt a holistic and granular security strategy to protect your file data infrastructure
The traditional “Castle and moat” approach of focusing on external threats rather than internal threats does not work in today’s file data environment, because applications do not exist in isolation.
Only a comprehensive solution can completely protect a company against increasingly sophisticated security threats such as ransomware, especially since file data, such as images, PDFs or even videos are created, processed and shared directly.
To address this situation, organizations need to have a holistic and granular view of data flows, access events and operations in an industry standard format that is supported by all organizations.
2. Ensure that backup solutions must be able to scale with data growth
The capabilities of backup and disaster recovery solutions also play a crucial role.
The increasing amount of file data in corporate systems could quickly overwhelm the ability of IT teams to back up and protect it. Only a scalable solution based on the cloud are able to provide this reactivity with contained costs.
3. Eliminate complexity with consistent and repeatable backup and recovery across all storage sites
The complexity must be removed from persistent orchestration to ensure consistent and repeatable backup and recovery across all of these sites.
It is important to manage file data changes in real time, even if the task remains difficult with ever larger quantities.
The use of advanced data insight capabilities coupled with APIs allow tracking which files have changed in real time, allowing backups to start in minutes instead of hours — up to 28 times faster than with traditional solutions.
Bottom line: Valuable assets require proactive protection
It is never too early to start thinking about a business continuity strategy. After all, once an attack or a serious data disaster occurs, especially files that represent valuable assets, without having taken proactive steps to protect the data — it’s impossible to turn back the clock.
While the management and protection of this file data has often been a headache for companies, good practices today make it much simpler and more intuitive despite the explosion in volumes and the diversification of environments.
A version of this story first appeared on the JDN, written by Vincent Gilbert, Qumulo. Click here to read the full article at journaldunet.com.
