In the past few weeks, the coronavirus crisis has driven a huge surge in remote working, creating a massive spike in the volume of unstructured data that businesses have to process, including phone calls, emails, instant messages and collaborative files – not to mention the sundry other files and databases that are generated as part of everyday business operations.
The reality of the situation is that nobody knows how long the current global lockdowns are going to continue for. Businesses may well be stuck in this mode of operations for months, and even when the quarantines do eventually lift, now that remote working has been proven as a viable option, many employees will no longer want to go back to their offices. What that means is that this data surge isn’t going to entirely subside when and if things go back to normal - businesses will have to adapt to a new and higher baseline level of data generation.
All of this data needs to be stored somewhere, but manually auditing and transferring it to the relevant storage location is an inefficient and time-consuming process for storage managers. The increased demands from remote workers and higher data volumes are also putting new stresses on infrastructure, which drives up maintenance costs and creates greater possibilities of outages or failures.
Instead, businesses can use modern data management tools to automatically transfer data to a highly scalable and easy-to-manage object storage platform with rules-based policies. This allows storage admins to take advantage of more cost-effective models, using smart algorithms to intelligently move infrequently-accessed data to low-cost archive storage, saving them money and allowing them to focus on mission-critical data instead.
Object storage is also particularly useful for accessing large volumes of unstructured data, which make up the core of big data projects, as it easily scales to support large datasets without requiring complex database schema or tiered folder architecture. Instead, the flat pool created by object storage allows for the sort of deep analysis that’s otherwise impossible with traditional file storage.
Register now to watch this on-demand webinar, brought to you in association with IBM, where you’ll hear from Gajun Ganendran, Asia Pacific CTO for IBM Cloud Platform and Moonwalk founder Michael Harvey, on topics including:
- How object storage can reduce time and cost spent on data backup operations
- Why object storage is best-suited to cloud-native applications
- The security benefits of object storage versus file-based cloud storage platforms
