RESEARCH FIRM GARTNER IN SEPTEMBER RELEASED ITS 2017 HYPE CYCLE for Cloud Security. Storage technologies abound on the slope of enlightenment—the point in the cycle where the benefits of a technology become more widely understood. Data loss protection sits squarely in this category, less than two years away from the plateau of productivity.
This is no surprise, given the volume of data pouring into the public cloud and, more recently, becoming part of the move to a hybrid environment . After all, data migration, management, and protection are trends causing some sleepless nights for CIOs and CISOs.
“Managing the huge increases in data from all applications and services is another dimension of the enterprise’s challenge as it goes digital,” says Eileen Sweeney, SVP and GM of Iron Mountain’s Global Data Management Group. “Managing data in a hybrid environment is even more difficult.”
Storing data in the cloud is making inroads because the platform provides IT with a scalable, predictable opex model. Instead of having to invest large amounts of capital for on-premises storage, IT can offload some or much of the organization’s existing storage into more cost-effective, cloud-based offerings. With a hybrid implementation, IT can also make that data available to multiple applications and users regardless of their locations. And with the rise of dedicated purpose-built clouds, such as Iron Mountain’s Iron Cloud, IT finally has a way to do all of the above in a secure, controlled manner.
“Providers talk about 99.999% availability, but it’s actually recoverability of the data that’s important. How fast can you recover if there’s an outage, or if you’re hit with a ransomware attack?”
-EILEEN SWEENEY,
SVP and GM of Iron Mountain’s Global
Data Management Group
“With Iron Cloud, customers gain cross-region geo-redundancy for disaster recoverability, data portability, and survivorship, so you know you have the ability to access and move data,” says Sweeney. In addition, she says, using a hybrid cloud like Iron Cloud means data migration, which at least until recently has been a difficult proposition for many users, is easier. Iron Mountain is solving this problem by offering physical transfer services to reduce the time and expense of moving a lot data electronically through a network. “With a service like our data shuttle,” Sweeney says, “we can help a customer transfer a large amount of data and avoid the latency and expense of limited network bandwidth. Iron Mountain shows up, transfers the data, securely transports it, and uploads it into our cloud.”
So how do CIOs choose the right hybrid cloud partner? It comes down to the need for recoverability, says Sweeney: “Providers talk about 99.999% availability, but it’s actually recoverability of the data that’s important. How fast can you recover if there’s an outage, or if you’re hit with a ransomware attack?”
www.ironmountain.com/ironcloud
