Intelligent CIO North America Issue 47 | Page 42

FEATURE : DISASTER RECOVERY AND BUSINESS CONTINUITY
What ’ s needed is a more affordable DR strategy which allows organizations to pick different levels of replication to non-identical destinations like the cloud based on the criticality of data .
This tiered strategy allows all data to be replicated but not with the same level of performance and in the same type of storage . Also , this replication can be asynchronous with a delay of when changes get propagated to offer some protection from a ransomware attack .

ENTERPRISE IT MUST BE ABLE TO DEPLOY FLEXIBLE AND COST-EFFECTIVE UNSTRUCTURED DATA REPLICATION AND ONGOING DATA LIFECYCLE MANAGEMENT POLICIES .

How and when does unstructured data management come to play ?
The first responsibility is to understand your data with visibility across all storage vendors – from on-premises to edge to the cloud .
Many enterprises don ’ t know how much data they have nor how fast it is growing company-wide and at the department level . They don ’ t have clear insights into file types and sizes or usage patterns – such as how much of their data is rarely used or where their PII and financial data is located .
Employees unwittingly copy sensitive data to incompliant locations .
An unstructured data management solution can index all your data in storage so that IT can see these trends and make better decisions for right-placing it . This ensures that you ’ re not overspending to protect less-critical or cold data .
With this knowledge , you can then look for a solution that can asynchronously replicate data at the share level . This means you can pick which shares you want to replicate , to where , and on what schedule .
You can configure different policies for different shares in the same volume and you can create a tiered DR program that doesn ’ t leave gaps for ransomware and hackers in general .
What about broader ransomware protection ?
A challenge with NAS mirroring is that although it provides near instant recovery , it does not really protect from cyberattacks because changes are propagated to both sites at nearly the same time .
While this synchronous replication ensures a nearinstantaneous Recovery Point Objective ( RPO ), its drawback is that a ransomware infection in the primary site will also infect the secondary site . So , with asynchronous replication , you can create a buffer that mitigates the issues with data being replicated at nearly the same time .
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