Moving towards a DMaaS World

Data is routinely being called the lifeblood, new oil, and the currency of the modern-age business world. This is because data has the potential to deliver unbeatable competitive advantages for organizations. As a result, companies are trying to store and analyze any and every bit of data that they can lay their hands on.

However, there are several factors that are preventing organizations from leveraging data to the fullest. Spiraling storage budgets, the lack of cutting-edge tools and infrastructure, and a deluge of data are some challenges that confront enterprises.

The pandemic has further added to the challenges of managing, recovering, and backing up data as enterprises hurriedly deployed new cloud applications and pivoted towards work from home. The shift to remote work has led to millions of data sources and devices from varied geographies getting connected to corporate networks. With data getting generated from diverse places, managing it becomes extremely difficult.

In the hybrid and multi-cloud world, IT leaders need to choose the right mix of performance and cost-effectiveness to manage their data across workloads. Efficient data management gives organizations control of their business data, both in the cloud and in setups where data is stored or sourced on-premises. The right data management strategy will seamlessly manage, protect, ensure compliance requirements, and utilize all the data-centric workloads without building silos.

In this rapidly changing enterprise technology landscape, almost all organizations are asking the question of how they can maximize their data for business growth. The answer lies in building a robust data management strategy.

The key for businesses looking at data management is to protect the data through its entire lifecycle, allowing its quick restoration whenever required, minimizing system downtimes, and enabling speedy access to data in situations of crisis.

While these parameters may appear obvious, achieving them is easier said than done. This is where DMaaS (Data Management as a Service) steps in.

Removing Complexity

Data-Management-as-a-Service enables the consolidation of data in a more efficient manner while doing away with the complexities of managing the infrastructure. This frees up the already overburdened IT department, allowing it to focus on maximizing value from data.

Also, DMaaS eliminates the need to deploy multiple point solutions for managing data. It can remove layers and layers of data infrastructure, thereby helping organizations by supporting various use cases such as disaster recovery, backup, dev/test, security, analytics, or any other as the need may arise.

The ability of DMaaS to move data flexibly across hybrid environments, while managing it in a centralized place simplifies operations significantly. This lowering of complexity makes it easier for companies to extract insights from data to compete better in the market.

Ensuring Cost Efficiency

Deploying a data management solution in the form of a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offering comes across as a cost-efficient approach. The SaaS model enables the transition from a CAPEX (capital expense) to an OPEX (operational expense) model that considers a capacity-based pricing model.

Such a strategy not only offers the business scalability but also drives costs down significantly when compared to deploying point data management solutions that are implemented for individual systems and have additional overhead administration costs.

Strengthening Security

Enterprises are increasingly being held to ransom with their critical data. The emergence of newer strains of malware and ransomware is posing a continual risk to enterprises and their crucial data despite the countermeasures they may have taken.

Cutting edge DMaaS platforms secure an enterprise's data management environment using intelligent data protection, and monitoring capabilities aimed explicitly against malware, including ransomware. Such solutions tap into the next level of cloud services such as AI and ML to detect ransomware or data classification services to address compliance and privacy concerns.

A state-of-the-at DMaaS solution is built on innovation, responsiveness, and rapid execution allowing users to validate backup copies by performing isolated recoveries of data to a network-less VM environment for verification.

All these functionalities help organizations to stay ahead of ransomware and other cyber threats.

The Era of DMaaS

In a new report titled “The Data Imperative,” KPMG found that companies in the technology, media, and telecommunications (TMT) sector have not focused enough time and effort on creating data strategies, even as COVID-19 forced them to make significant investments in digital transformation. In fact, the survey reported that 57% of the companies surveyed lacked an “enterprise-level data strategy.” Meanwhile, the importance of data as a growth enabler has been rising by the day.

Today’s enterprises are confronting hyper-accelerated cloud transformation even as they grapple with the pressure to secure data against cyberthreats in hybrid environments while optimizing resources

DMaaS appears as the perfect solution for CIOs in such a scenario. DMaaS solutions are evolving to include a comprehensive set of services such as disaster recovery, security, backup and archiving, and analytics, all on a single platform. These solutions use next-gen technologies like ML to identify anomalies and catch cyberattacks in progress.

It is imperative for enterprise technology leaders to look at DMaaS as a viable solution to address the complexities of the digital age, and put their enterprises back in the drivers’ seat with their data.

Authored By Anshuman Rai, Area VP, India, and South Asia, Commvault