34 By Paul Speciale, CMO, Scality What keeps you up at night? IT leaders are hard-pressed to name just one thing. Throughout my many years in the storage industry, I’ve seen my fair share of data disasters (and sleepless nights). Data loss after a power outage. A disk drive fails — data disappears. Flooding that wipes out entire data centers. The list goes on. And now we’re facing a widespread and increasingly sophisticated menace: Ransomware. While the threats are real and the hits keep on coming, panic does us no good. Readiness does. It’s not a matter of if disaster will strike but when, so we need proactive problem-solving and planning to keep our data safe from all potential dangers, including those of today and tomorrow. Keeping data protected is no easy feat: 5 top threats “Disruption” is often used as a blanket term to describe any sort of IT incident. If you’ve personally experienced one, you’d probably agree the word doesn’t do justice to the sheer chaos and steep cost caused by these situations. A single hour of downtime totals $300,000 or more for 91% percent of mid-sized enterprises and large enterprises. And among that 91% majority, 44% of corporations report hourly outage costs exceeding $1 million to over $5 million, according to ITIC’s 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey. IT leaders are confronted by a variety of threats to mission-critical data, including: Planned and unplanned outages: About 75% of data center operators report having an IT service outage in the last three years, according to a 2021 analysis by Uptime Institute. Both scheduled and surprise outages of various types, including those due to human error, make data vulnerable to corruption or loss by reducing redundancy. Software bugs: These issues can occur at any level of the application and infrastructure stack, and they require preventative and resolution planning just as with physical platform components. Infrastructure failures: While common disk errors and failures can be resolved without a whole lot of hassle, more systemic events, such as network, application-induced overloads, are impossible to predict and cause major disruption. Data center failures: Power outages and site disasters can significantly interrupt IT services and have long-term resolution times. Malicious activity: It’s estimated that ransomware attacks will cost victims around $265 billion annually by 2031, according to Cybersecurity Ventures, with a new attack perpetrated every two seconds. Malware actors are getting smarter and increasingly pervasive all the time, operating as syndicates with specialized skills for striking systems in more and more advanced ways. Now is the time to secure and protect primary as well as backup systems since they, too, are now attack targets. To safeguard your organization’s data from these types of threats, a solid mitigation and recovery plan must be in place — because you can’t afford to lose your most invaluable and irreplaceable asset. Uniting the best of public and private clouds: A new approach to data protection Traditional storage approaches weren’t designed for today’s cloud era. They simply can’t scale — a limitation that results in costly silo management headaches. For good reason, public cloud adoption has rapidly risen because there’s a lot to like in terms of agility and scalability. It’s a good option for some applications and for short-term data storage, but it doesn’t provide users with enough control over the infrastructure, the performance is lacking, security can be an issue, and its economic efficiency yields diminishing returns over time. While the cloud delivers on its “cheaper and better” promise early on, margins take a hit as organizations scale and growth slows. At the point when the cost of cloud “takes over,” it can lock up hundreds of billions of market cap. This catch-22 is sometimes referred to as “the cloud paradox.” What’s needed is a secure, cost-effective solution that can scale as your needs grow over the next five to ten years — one that makes data accessible to both your legacy applications and your new cloud/cloud-native applications, eliminating silos and enabling fast innovation. Enter unbreakable cloud storage for data centers, a solution that unites the virtues of public cloud with the control, performance, and security advantages of on-premises private cloud infrastructure. It encompasses multiple layers of protection to keep data from being unavailable, lost, corrupted, unintentionally modified, deleted, overwritten or — as with ransomware attacks — encrypted against your will. Get proactive about protection with Scality unbreakable cloud storage for data centers What makes it truly unbreakable, you ask? Unbreakable cloud storage for data centers delivers a formidable combination of speed, scale, and safety. It grows exponentially with you. It’s adaptable, easy to manage, and immutable. Immutability is widely recognized as a must-have in the fight against ransomware, but it effectively safeguards data from any deletion or modification (whether it be malicious or accidental). Scality provides immutability via support for S3 Object Lock API. This capability makes it a bulletproof solution for protecting against and recovering from ransomware attacks as well as other incidents, with the lowest possible recovery point objective/recovery time objective (RPO/RTO.) Remember when tape was regarded as the perfect air-gap medium to isolate critical data from vulnerable local networks and production areas? That time has passed. While tape offers longevity and a good cost-per-terabyte ratio, it comes with high operational overhead that just doesn’t make sense for today’s enterprises. Scality S3-compatible immutable object storage provides the gold standard of air-gapped protection along with affordable cloud-scale benefits for tens of petabytes and beyond. IDC measures Scality customers’ real-world results Global companies using Scality’s unbreakable cloud storage in their data centers are seeing big benefits to their bottom line, including a 366% return on investment (ROI) over a five-year period and 59% lower TCO per petabyte than alternative solutions, according to new analysis by IDC. Scality solutions save companies money on the cost of storage (a reduction of up to 65%) while also providing access to more storage — 192% more capacity, to be specific. With 19% more productive analytics teams and 34% more productive end users, IT organizations are empowered to work more efficiently and spend more time on business and strategic projects. 31% more efficient IT infrastructure staff? Yes, it’s possible. IDC research reveals how your peers are building hybrid storage solutions with big returns. SEE THE STUDY > Ultimate data protection for your peace of mind There’s no getting around it. As an IT leader, you will be confronted with numerous threats to your company’s data — and though they can’t always be prevented, they can be planned for. We’re here to support you. At Scality, our sole purpose is to relieve your stress when it comes to data storage and protection. Our unbreakable solutions ensure that your data is always 100% available and never lost so you can maximize its potential — and your peace of mind. Interested in learning more about how this new era of cloud storage counters ransomware attacks and other threats? Check out our webinar or request a demo.
