Backup and Archive-as-a-Service may seem like a good fit for many businesses, though CommVault warns it is not without its pitfalls.
A/NZ area vice-president, Bryan Stibbard, points to a Forrester report where 51 per cent of respondents said they stayed on-premise because of security concerns, mainly due to accessibility and availability of data.
“Security is of the main inhibitors of people moving infrastructure off-premise, as well as the reasoning for staying on-premise,” he said.
“Their concern is whether they will be able to get data back once it is moved off-premise.”
Stibbard said this not only raises questions about the data being secure, but whether there is a process and mechanism for getting it back easily.
“That is the consideration for most businesses, and influences the balance of adopting private versus public Cloud, or going with the hybrid approach,” he said.
The dark side
“Dark Data” is term Gartner has coined in reference to the unstructured data incurs more expense, and sometimes greater risk, than value.
Stibbard said it is the type of data a business ends up spending more on than its actual worth, and it is a trend he is seeing grow in A/NZ.
“That unstructured data that has strong business value, but unless organisations know how to understand the makeup of the data and how to extract value, then the cost of storing it on a tier-one disk can be far greater than the actual value of the data,” he said.
Rather than “keeping everything forever,” Stibbard recommends keeping the right data and moving it to the right tier of storage for the right recovery configuration.
Patrick Budmar covers consumer and enterprise technology breaking news for IDG Communications. Follow Patrick on Twitter at @patrick_budmar.
