Our Cloud Data Protection blog series has ranged from the scalability, security, and simplicity inherent to cloud-native solutions to malware protection and lowering costs. We also discussed the power of rich metadata applied to otherwise unstructured content. This power is particularly beneficial when it comes to leveraging a data protection solution for something seemingly unrelated: big data analytics. That, and improving eDiscovery and compliance, are the subjects of this last blog in our series.
Without question, data is at the core of digital transformation. It’s the raw material for analytics that provide critical insights to uncover opportunities and expedite decision making. Indeed, ZDnet reported that digital transformation spending will approach $2 trillion by 2022. This is often overlooked as one of the prime benefits of cloud data protection — its potential to simultaneously transform your backup information into a rich store of big data for analytics and other applications.
How does an effective, cloud-native data protection application do this? First, it accesses all of your enterprise data across endpoint, data center, and cloud workloads. Second, it collects it into one copy using a unified data model. Third, it provides immediate accessibility for any authorized user. The only difference between restoring lost data and providing raw data for analytics software is who or what program receives it. For that matter, there’s no reason a sophisticated cloud data protection app can’t add custom metadata to better enable analytics software.
Legal holds, eDiscovery, and compliance
When an enterprise gets involved in legal action, they have to keep any and all data connected to the legal action safe and accessible. That’s much easier said than done. It means using a policy-based approach to categorizing and tagging all electronic communications — including e-mail, instant messages, and web transactions. Adding to the challenge, this data can live anywhere in the enterprise network or cloud, on an employee’s smartphone or hosted by a SaaS app. If an enterprise can’t produce needed data for a legal inquiry, spoliation sanctions can be harsh.
The essence of the legal hold challenge is ensuring that all relevant data is identified, safe, and accessible for eDiscovery. Cloud data protection is uniquely appropriate. The right app can add metadata to identify all enterprise files, indicating not only time data but legal hold applicability. Cloud storage is virtually always more secure than on-premises infrastructure, with all major cloud service providers offering at least 10-nines durability. Legal hold data must often reside in specific geographic regions. However, for eDiscovery in the public cloud, if there’s an internet connection and secure credentials, there’s access.
The exact same capabilities that make the cloud appropriate for legal hold and eDiscovery challenges apply for compliance requirements as well. With secure cloud data that is readily searchable and always accessible, governance and regulatory compliance is far simpler.
In the process of providing optimized data protection, cloud-native Druva adds rich metadata to enterprise data. This makes data more quickly accessible for backups, eDiscovery, and compliance, and also prepares it for faster processing by big data analytics apps. Druva is a flexible, cloud-native solution that offers cloud backup and disaster recovery across endpoints, data center, and cloud workloads — without requiring any dedicated hardware, software, or skilled resources. And Druva Cloud Platform is built on AWS, making it secure, infinitely scalable, and globally accessible.
This six-part Cloud Data Protection blog series includes:
- Why enterprises are turning to the cloud for data protection
- Satisfy your business needs with the right cloud-only strategy
- Enhance your cloud data protection with rich metadata
- Stay ahead of malware with cloud data protection
- How the cloud lowers your TCO
We hope you’ve enjoyed them! For more detail about why the cloud is the place for enterprise data protection and management, download the Cloud Data Protection for Dummies book and our ClO’s Guide to Cloud-first Data Protection.