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Data storage: The backbone of data center resiliency

Data is truly the lifeblood of business operations—as evidenced by the explosion of data, which is expected to swell from 120 zettabytes in 2023 to 180 zettabytes by 2025. The backbone of data center resiliency is secure, effective, high-performing data storage. Here’s how modern data storage solutions reinforce data center resiliency.

Minimizing downtime and preventing data loss

“Downtime” and “data loss” are two terms that no one wants to hear spoken in the context of their business. While estimates vary on the business costs of downtime and data loss, we can all agree that they can take a heavy toll on your bottom line—and that prevention and rapid recovery play a critical role in data center resiliency. 

A great place to start is with protecting data at the lowest level, the disk layer. RAID configurations, which distribute data across multiple disks, are an excellent option as they eliminate single points of failure that could compromise your entire system. Many storage platforms implement snapshot technologies as well, which allows for instant rollback of the data to a previous, known good state. Furthermore, using N+1 and 2N redundancy with backup power, cooling, and network systems can help your business sidestep outages and data access issues caused by local infrastructure failures.

We can also ensure continuous data access by focusing on system redundancy, leveraging multiple tactics. For example, implementing data replication across locations can ensure availability should the data become corrupted, lost, or inaccessible due to infrastructure hardware failures. As a best practice, organizations should store and replicate data in two or three locations, which can include on-premises, the cloud, or a combination of the two.

Safeguarding data from corruption and cyber attacks

Modern data storage solutions go a long way toward safeguarding against corruption and cyber attacks like ransomware by detecting anomalies early, containing damage, and expediting recovery. Performing regular backups to offsite locations or the cloud (ideally automated) ensures that data can be restored to a specific point in time if compromised. Immutable backups that can’t be altered or deleted are especially effective while air-gapped storage provides additional protection against sophisticated attacks. A mature data protection strategy implements multiple of these strategies to follow the 3-2-1 rule: 3 copies of your data, on 2 different storage mediums, and 1 of the copies is offsite, air gapped, and immutable.  It is also important to regularly test the restoration of data and recovery plans.

Ensuring scalability for rapid data growth

As your business grows, you want your storage infrastructure to scale as well. That’s where elastic storage solutions come into play, especially in cloud environments. Elastic storage enables your business to boost storage capacity automatically, ensuring you always have the right amount of storage. Dynamic provisioning ensures storage resources get allocated automatically based on demand, so as data demands rise and fall, your storage system adapts to handle data loads efficiently and prevent performance bottlenecks and service interruptions.

Securing sensitive information

Protecting the privacy and the integrity of your data is non-negotiable. It is important to first classify your data to properly secure it according to its value, sensitivity, and risk. Employing data encryption, both at rest and in transit, is critical for ensuring your data remains secure in the event of unauthorized access. End-to-end encryption protects sensitive data throughout its lifecycle, making it unreadable to anyone without authorization. Furthermore, data corruption can also be an issue. This can be mitigated by performing regular data integrity checks, using file systems designed for data integrity, and performing regular data backups.

Maximizing ROI from storage solutions

To maintain a competitive advantage, high-performance storage systems are essential. Tiered storage solutions enable efficient use of storage resources by assigning frequently accessed, mission-critical data to faster (more expensive) storage media. Tiered storage also assigns less critical data to slower (more affordable) options. Additionally, caching can improve data access times by storing frequently used data in fast-access storage, reducing latency and preventing system overloads during high-demand periods.

Proactively managing risks with monitoring and automation

Proactive monitoring and automated management simplify management, protection, resiliency, and optimization of your storage infrastructure. These capabilities provide detailed, real-time insights into the performance and health of your storage systems so you can gauge storage solution health and identify potential issues before they escalate into costly failures.

Register for a complimentary Data Center Strategy Workshop

By embracing advanced storage technologies, businesses can ensure that their data centers are prepared to withstand future challenges. 

At GDT, we’ve helped countless customers improve their cyber resilience in the data center. In fact, when it comes to data storage, GDT works with the industry’s most trusted providers, including NetApp, where GDT is a top-tier Prestige Partner

If you want to increase your cyber resilience, our complimentary Data Center Strategy Workshop is a great place to start. During this custom workshop, we’ll help you assess the current state of your data protection and ransomware readiness and explore solutions to help your business increase your cyber resilience and close security gaps. Or, if you’re looking for more strategies for building cyber resilience, check out this two-part series on building data center resiliency. The workshop is complimentary and obligation-free, and it gives you a great starting point for reinforcing your data center resiliency. 

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