By Hayden Sadler, Country Manager at Infinidat

Over the last few years, the dialogue about storage has shifted from focusing exclusively on cost efficiencies and performance, towards cybersecurity. This radical shift is part of the realisation that storage has become a critical element of an overall corporate cybersecurity strategy. Both primary and secondary storage are integral to cyber resilience, and a storage strategy needs to incorporate immutable snapshots, fast recovery, fenced forensic environments and incredibly rapid recover. Here are five top tips and key considerations for embarking on your enterprise storage journey, especially in light of the rise of cyberattacks.

Performance

Despite the fact that performance is no longer the single most important element of a storage strategy, it remains crucial. The ability to access data in microseconds across multi-petabyte data sets is a cornerstone of competitive advantage in every industry, from retail and financial services to healthcare, manufacturing, and managed services. This ability can be enabled using a machine learning algorithm that recognises correlations in data access patterns and predicts future I/O requests, which are pre-emptively staged in the DRAM cache. Using intelligent storage algorithms can deliver highly available storage with ultra-low latency, boosting application performance and business productivity. 

Availability

Businesses today are increasingly data-driven, and they cannot afford downtime that results in financial loss, reputational damage, customer dissatisfaction, and more. Data storage needs to support 100% uptime, availability, and the storage architecture should support an active:active:active configuration that eliminates the traditional performance impacts of component failures. This means that even if multiple discs fail, there is no loss of data. Storage should also incorporate end-to-end business continuity features such as synchronous replication, asynchronous remote mirroring, and snapshots. Be sure to look for a supplier that provides a guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA) on their availability.

Cost of ownership versus return on investment

Migrating from legacy systems should deliver both reduced capital and operational expenses, while improving application performance and reliability. The return on investment of a solution should deliver business benefits as well as both direct and indirect cost savings, from reduced downtime to improved performance. The time to pay back the investment in an intelligent storage solution should be less than six months for a maximum Return on Investment (ROI) and minimum Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). 

Flexible consumption

Business has changed and the way we procure and deliver technology needs to evolve. Flexible consumption models enable businesses to utilize a cloud-like consumption model with a storage system that includes excess capacity to allow room for growth, and access additional storage capacity as needed using elastic pricing. The entire capacity is pre-installed to shorten procurement times, but businesses only pay for what they need, allowing them to scale up and down as required. This not only caters for growth but allows for swing workloads and temporary needs. Each of these models can also be combined to address swing workloads and temporary needs. 

Resilient, efficient, powerful

Cybersecurity is a top priority and creating cyber resilience that extends to primary storage architecture is key. There are four fundamental capabilities that are critical to developing a cyber resilience strategy, specifically immutable snapshots, logical air gaps, a fenced forensic environment and near-instantaneous recovery. Immutable snapshots create a point-in-time safety net that is immune to alteration, while logical air gaps provide separation of storage infrastructure for deeper protection and a fenced forensic environment isolates critical data and secures compute resources. Near-instantaneous recovery expedites the ability to get clean data back into production to minimise downtime. And, as with 100% availability, be sure to look for a vendor with guaranteed SLAs around their enterprise storage cyber resilience.

Ultimately, cyber resilience needs to be built into storage and data infrastructure, otherwise businesses put themselves at risk of cyberattacks like ransomware causing costly downtime that can be detrimental to businesses. The storage layer, including both primary and secondary storage, is a critical component in protecting businesses against cyberthreats and ensuring continued productivity and a competitive advantage.