Does your business make up one of the estimated 85% of UK businesses which collect personal data from employees, customers or other individuals?
If so, you may find that once collected, processed, and stored this high volume of data can find itself strewn across a complex IT landscape. From on-premises servers, cloud, applications, remote applications, and personal devices it may become hard to keep track of or monitor.
As businesses grow and find themselves gathering more critical data this issue develops, with the resulting infrastructure becoming unmanageable, under-utilised, and less efficient. This then leads to vulnerability and data exposure to ever-increasing threats and cyber-attacks, as well as human error or natural disasters.
With a mid-2020 IDC study finding that 80% of surveyed IT leaders identified data sprawl as one of the most critical problems facing their organisations, how can your organisation manage their infrastructure and in so doing safeguard vital data?
- Complete an infrastructure audit and assessment
Do you know where across your IT infrastructure your data is located, what each system processes and who has access to it? If not, there could be serious implications for your business both in the short and long term.
As well as hard hitting regulatory, and security consequences, if your employees struggle to locate specific information quickly and accurately or spend time looking for data which turns out to be Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial (ROT) there can be a detrimental effect on productivity and business resources.
You need to know what hardware you have, what data it holds, and who has responsibility for it. The most effective way to achieve this is through an audit and assessment of your IT infrastructure in which you identify all assets, understand the associated costs, and determine governance and ownership.
This exercise will also ensure that depending on what industry you are in and what sensitive data you hold, you have peace of mind that you are doing all you need to do in relation to corporate governance and risk management
- Consolidate your hardware
Have you given thought to how efficient your servers and other hardware are? Are you using servers for single as opposed to multiple workloads?
Not only can multiple and underused servers waste financial resources, energy, and space but they can add to the unmanageable infrastructure sprawl within your organisation. The more physical servers you have the harder it is to keep track of where everything is.
Look to reduce the number of physical servers you use or consider virtual servers or off-site cloud-based ones. The latter will transfer energy costs and storage usage out of your workspace allowing multiple workloads to take place simultaneously on one piece of equipment.
Bear in mind your own compliance and security issues when it comes to consolidation. For example, if a server is affected and you have a high number of workloads on it, then this could mean increased downtime and reduced productivity.
- Identify and classify your data
Regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and data governance policies means you need to know what sensitive data you have and where it is to set access and security controls and responsibilities. This is important to have as your data grows.
Effectively identifying and classifying data by sensitivity and risk i.e., is it public, business-critical, or for day-to-day internal operations, helps to make it easy for stakeholders to prioritise and protect the data your business holds.
It is also valuable in helping to remove redundant or historic information, bearing in mind compliance, privacy, or legislative procedures.
From this establish clear data governance policies to consistently track and manage data as well as define ownership and accountability. Updating this as more data is gathered will ensure greater accuracy, availability and confidentiality as your business grows, regulations change, and the IT environment evolves.
- Backup and protect data
An unstructured IT infrastructure and resultant data sprawl can lead to a disorganised data management approach with a variety of tools implemented across both on and off-site providers.
This disparity can in turn lead to increased costs, inefficiencies, and security risks due to confusion around how, where and when backup takes place.
It is therefore vital to centralise your infrastructure and data to create an effective, scalable, and manageable backup and recovery plan.
Using a Backup as a Service Solution (BaaS) such as that offered by Brightsolid provides centralised data storage, end-to end security protection, and management.
Through an easy-to-use console you have an efficient and robust backup and recovery with complete visibility of all workloads, access control and 100% compliance as you know where your data is. It also enables you to grow or reduce your storage as you need it, without investment in new hardware.
Tackle your infrastructure sprawl and speak to one of our experts today. Together we can protect your valuable data, manage it effectively and achieve the clarity you need for success.