Managing Your Data Today for Business Value Tomorrow

Aspire Technology Partners collaborated with Cohesity’s Joshua Haley, Field Technical Director, to share his insights on Data Management and Protection.

It was not long ago, data represented a cost to your organization – one that you answered by purchasing additional storage and compute hardware. Most of that data began and lived its life in your data center where you were able to derive some type of business value from it.

Today, however, many of us have seen a huge shift in the way we think about data. Data is an asset. It often begins and ends life well outside the data center, at the edge where it exists as IoT data or in the cloud ready to provide the necessary analytics that will benefit your business. It has – or can have – tremendous impact for your organization. In fact, today we live in a world where data defines your brand. What you know and can act on about your brand and its role in your industry and community often comes from data that resides outside the organization in the cloud.

Data Defines Your Brand & Drives Business Value

Since data defines your brand, it should also define your data management architecture, policies, and processes. Yes, we can begin to design management policies and processes to enable infrastructure independence. However, just because the cloud enables self-service, does not mean, and should not mean, that you should enable storage compliance to become self service as well. Data protection must be an integral part of the process of data storage management. And because data defines your brand today, you can assume that data will play an even more critical role for your organization in the future. For these reasons, it is important to understand the future value of your decisions regarding data management and data protection.

Most of that data resides in the Cloud . While you may focus on using data storage and management tools today – for back-up, for archives, for data handling – you should consider the entire data plane that exists within your organization. That data plane spans from the edge, where sensors and actuators gather data from smart cities, wearables, mobile devices, connected devices and social media communications, across SaaS business applications on-premise and in hybrid clouds, to business operations where the data can impact decision making.

When viewed in this way, it makes sense to consider a data management platform that replaces a disparate set of tools to harness and aggregate fragmented sources of data that today exists in silos with unmanaged duplicates.

Learn about the Aspire Data Center Practice

Back to Data Management Basics

Many of you may find that your data footprint has exploded in your data management journey. You focus on data management basics – data protection, disaster recovery and business continuity (DC/BR), and file and object services. The idea of a data management platform to manage your data plane may sound great but not practical right now. You want to ensure that your backups meet service level agreements and that can recover from a data loss event and, hopefully, protect your organization from an ever-increasing number of security threats.

In addition, your data storage environment may have begun as an on-premise architecture that is now beginning to be transformed to the cloud. Now you look for ways to manage storage in two places, hopefully with the same tools.

Cohesity: Tools for Today & Platform for Tomorrow

Businesses may meet the needs of today while preparing for future data storage management needs. We have helped customers across multiple industries focus on handling today’s tactical issues of providing good backups, good security, data hygiene, and disaster recovery while also considering the data lifecycle and creating an overarching data management strategy.

Some of our customers did not think they were ready for a data management platform, but we showed them how we could use Cohesity to take care of daily tactics that would lead to later benefits by turning their data into business value.

Aspire is a Cohesity partner, and we leverage the Cohesity Data Management Platform to protect and make customer data available at all times. We help them ensure continuity and repurpose their data to provide additional value to the business. We begin by eliminating data silos to reduce cost and complexity, then we help them provide greater visibility into their data so they can increase data intelligence and act on data in the cloud.