Data Protection: The Last Line of Defense for Your Data Center

Just recently, one of my customers—a large K-12 School District—was hit by a major ransomware breach. Just how major was it? The breach was so major that the whole (and I really mean the WHOLE) data center was inoperable. Primary data and backup data was encrypted beyond usability.  Management systems of production devices and the backup application systems were compromised beyond recoverability. Active Directory and authentication capabilities were locked out. The result was that the data center became a bunch of bare-metal hardware with blinking lights.

Every morning when I get up, there are a series of apps that I fire up to gather my daily dose of information that fuels my personal, financial, and work life. In this day and age, I need to access the data on my mobile device/smartphone or PC anywhere and at any time. For all practical purposes, I really don’t care how that information is processed behind the scenes.

Isn’t that typical of how we consume information in today’s digital transformation age? Being a technical person, I do understand how this information is produced and delivered, but most of us just want the information when we demand it – we don’t care about how it gets to us. That is, until our business is the one that must provide the data to consumers, who demand convenient access to it at all times. So, how does data get delivered to consumers’ devices of choice?

There are a lot of new terms these days around data center networking. Software-defined-this and that-as-a-service are among the leaders. Neither of these are new concepts in technology, but emphasize a new way of looking at how data centers work. Networks have already been “software-defined” and virtualized for an incredibly long time, but now the emphasis is on abstracting the intent from the configuration and treating the entire network as a system. Cisco’s entry into software-defined networking (SDN) is its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). ACI has a lot of new concepts and terminology, especially around the abstraction mentioned earlier, but that will not be our current focus.

Recently, I have been talking to many customers about data center resiliency as part of ConvergeOne’s Data Center Foundation Workshops. Before beginning an implementation, it’s important to know where customers are at, so I start by asking them if they would be able to recover from a data center failure in their current state.

It’s time to step up your game.

In order to thrive in the coming years, most businesses must undergo digital transformation. According to Gartner, 67% of business leaders believe that in order to remain competitive, their organization will have to undergo significant digitalization by 2020. With digital initiatives serving as the top priority for 2019 according to Gartner's CIO Agenda 2019, it sounds like many organizations are already in the midst of successful digital transformation, right? Not so fast. Forrester Research reports a bleak state of digital transformation, with many companies failing to realize the full extent of their transformational opportunities.

In my last blog post, I discussed the differences between hyper-converged infrastructure and traditional data center infrastructure. Now that you understand the value of shifting to hyper-converged infrastructure, what do you do next? Let’s say you’re preparing for your data center refresh. You’re planning for some growth in storage and performance, and you have to future-proof for the next three or perhaps even five years. Not only that, but you also have to reduce your total cost of ownership (TCO), which involves reducing your data center space, cooling, and power. You’ll be looking to streamline your operations and gain cost efficiencies along the way, too.

Hyper-converged infrastructure is one of the fastest-growing trends taking over data centers today. Many organizations have either already moved or heavily considering moving to this architecture. So, what’s the big deal about hyper-converged infrastructure? Let’s begin with an explanation of the traditional data center design and what differentiates hyper-converged infrastructure from it.

If you’re struggling to meet today’s demanding business requirements with your traditional compute architecture, it may be time to move to a converged architecture. Why? Let’s begin with a discussion of the high-level differences between traditional and converged architectures. We’ll then explore the pros and cons of each approach.

The discussion around active/active data centers can dovetail into a great number of conversations, from business processes to facilities management. Before engaging in such conversations, it’s important that you begin with an understanding of the business requirements that necessitate the implementation of active/active data centers so that you can determine if such an approach will align with your data center and overall business strategies.