Defining Structured, Semi-Structured, and Unstructured Data

In my last blog post, I explained the value of unstructured data. In this post, I'd like to define structured and semi-structured data to further explain the meaning of unstructured data.

When employees were first sent to work from home, organizations scrambled to provide work-from-home software, devices, and infrastructure. As we transition to a new normal, it’s now important to reevaluate the initial infrastructure laid to support remote workers against a lasting, best-practice architecture. In the last entry, I shared the first three pillars for a thriving remote workforce. Let’s now explore the final three pillars.

Operating a remote workforce is no longer just a remote possibility. A work-from-home war is being quietly waged across many organizations throughout the country, as workers who were forced to quickly establish home office environments now wish to remain in their home rather than return to commuting to an office. This tipping point has deep and wide ramifications for organizations attempting to return to pre-COVID-19 productivity levels. 

I was recently asked by a colleague to build a portal to allow engineers to start and stop two Amazon EC2 instances that host software used network discovery and mapping. The intent was to only have them running when necessary to reduce the cost of instances running when they are not in use.  Jokingly, I asked if he wanted me to build this portal on an EC2 instance. He didn’t catch the joke, so I explained that running one full-time instance to control two other instances was probably not going to be very effective at saving money.

Every 11 seconds, someone within the United States is infected with ransomware. That means that by the time you finish reading this blog post, almost 30 people will have their data locked and encrypted unless they pay a cybercriminal a ransom of hundreds or thousands of dollars (hopefully it’s not YOU!).

Everyone has heard about how fast data growth is expanding in our world the past few years. More and more data is being generated, and organizations are being asked to retain that data for longer periods of time. The reason for this data explosion should not be a mystery, as there are multiple popular modern technologies that are at the heart of it. We live in the age of the Internet of Things (IoT), where a dizzying array of machines, devices, and endpoints are connected to the internet and actively collecting, creating, and sharing more and more data.

Many of the customers I interact with have on-premises data centers, and they swear that they will never go to the cloud. On the other side of the spectrum, some customers have fully embraced cloud, to the point where they are running all their workloads in the cloud. In the middle, I have customers who are running some applications in the cloud and some on-premises—a hybrid environment, if you will. As a Solutions Architect, I feel the need to expand on why organizations choose between these varying architectures when designing their data center.

I recently had a meaningful conversation with a customer as we spoke of a three-year plan to move “everything” into the cloud. I hear this statement over and over again, and it always brings visions to my mind of jumping into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim. For most, the perception is that the cloud provides a robust data center for multiple use cases—anywhere from dev, test, disaster recovery, and, of course, production workloads. Organizations look to the cloud as a way to solve their challenges in operating on-premises primary, secondary, or multi-tier data centers. I certainly agree with that mindset. Cloud would not be a multibillion-dollar business today if it wasn’t ready for primetime. 

With all the talk about ransomware and cybersecurity breaches, many have wondered – what data protection strategy should I be deploying? How can I ensure that I have another copy of my data that is isolated (and by isolated, I mean that if ransomware does crypto-lock my data, I can go to my “safe deposit box” and restore my data center)? Ironically, we have been preaching to our customers over the last few years that tape is dead and should be replaced with disk-based backup storage or cloud repositories for long-term retention. Now I have to face those same customers and tell them that the best way to airgap their data is to archive their backups to tape. Yes, it sounds old school, but it is the best way to remain protected from all the modern threats to your data.

As we approach the end of 2019, it’s important to think back to the accomplishments and lessons learned this year. I am fortunate to lead a team of highly talented Data Center Solutions Architects, and we’ve had a very busy year. One of the new things we’re offering in 2019 is a Data Center Resiliency Workshop, which is a two-hour workshop we conduct with customers. We ask over 160 questions and evaluate eight technologies: