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05 June 2020

Yes, it’s another sports analogy blog.

Everyone wants to be Lionel Messi

Michael Jordan, Pelé and Mia Hamm. History has shown us that we remember and talk about these types of players more often than those in defensive roles (putting athletes like Dennis Rodman or Cafu aside of course!). It is the same with data.

Just like most sports there are two sides to data; defence & offence (or Defense and Offense for our American readers). When data defence and data offence are discussed in business it is highly likely that the chat will quickly turn towards offence. This often happens because a strong data offence strategy gives a business an exciting platform for growth. And this is what drives most business leaders.

Either side could win it, or it could be a draw!

But if the focus of business investment is offence, spending less on governance and security increases risk. This means that a business could start to lose just as quickly as the offensive strategy sets it up to win. As Sir Alex Ferguson once said ‘Attacking wins games, but defending wins championships’. What Sir Alex means is that good defence ensures that you’re not losing ground and this in turn allows your offensive strategy to be much more effective.

Its squeaky-bum time.

The words from Sir Alex are probably more relevant today then they have ever been. The current crisis has seen much of the economy go into a deep freeze as businesses try and figure out their next move, while simultaneously looking at ways to preserve cash. As governments around the world look to kick start their economies back to life it will be interesting to see which strategy businesses will take.

Will we see them setting themselves up like a Jose Mourinho Spurs side? Will they go into a 99% defensive, hunker-down mode and then with the remaining 1% try and pick off any chances that come their way? Or will they setup themselves up like Thomas Tuchel’s Paris Saint-Germain to attack and drive new ways of operating, so they don’t just survive the pandemic but accelerate out of it?

Sometimes in football you have to score goals.

So how does this relate to data? Well a strong data defence strategy will ease the effort needed to deliver your data offence strategy. If data is well controlled, defined & protected then it becomes much easier to reuse this critical resource for offence. So, while data defence may not be as exciting as offence, it is just as important.

The question then is a simple one. Do you setup yourselves up with a play not to lose strategy? Or do you play to win? Just like with football teams the answer will be different for every business. Whatever you decide, ensure your defence is watertight because without this your growth will always be fragile.

If you want help ensuring your data defence is watertight why not check out Predatar Insights and get the inside track on your data performance here.

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02 June 2020

Spin, Damn Spin and Statistics in Cloud Backup

Backup was in the spotlight again last week with news from IBM, Veeam and Kasten. The latter two companies teaming up to solve the complexity of data protection for hybrid clouds. Veeam established in virtual machine protection, Kasten focused on Kubernetes workloads.

Not to be outdone, IBM announced enhancements to Storage Protect to support its corporate strategy of helping enterprise customers transition workloads to cloud. Notable announcements included backup for AWS EC2 instances and extended use of Object storage and tape, burnishing its security credentials. Improved integration with Kubernetes Labels will make it easier for developers to protect application data and systems, in groups.

Anonymous Spin

Unfortunately, both announcements were filled with references to malware and cyber crime in general. This, rather than the new features, is the focus of the blog. It got us wondering what triggers backup, or more accurately, recovery incidents? We looked at data in Predatar over a five-year period from 2014 (roughly the period when ransomware became part of the general IT psyche), to 2019.

Some observations.

Firstly, every organisation did at least one restore in any calendar year, ranging from dozens to thousands of restores. As a percentage, average recovery ranged from 2.5% to 4% of total data backed up. If a company backed up 100TB of data, in any calendar year it would recover between 2.5TB and 4TB. It has a 1 in 25 chance of needing to recover a known data set, regardless of whether it is the victim of a ransomware attack.

It’s not the extreme tail-risks that’ll get you (or your data at least), but boring, often routine, malfunctions and errors.

Media Spin

Newsrooms and media barons don’t attract audiences or sell newspapers with the mundane. For every news grabbing homicide in the USA, twenty-five people die quietly from heart problems. The data protection barons seem intent on copying this narrative by insisting every press release is laced with images of corporate calamity at the hands of cyber criminals.

Secondly, what’s important is not so much your ability to avoid all incidents but your ability to handle them well. There has been a tendency, as the technologists we are, to rely too much on automation and product features. We try to design and architect out of existence every conceivable failure. This is admirable but it’s impossible to avoid random but inevitable events. It’s more important to stay alert. Mortality figures again offer up an example…

Take it for a Spin

Did you know in some European countries, more pedestrian-crossing users (“zebra” for our American friends) die than jaywalkers? The health and safety interventions designed to protect us can have unintended consequences. Foot walkers switch off when using a zebra crossing; jaywalkers stay alert.

The secret to staying “backup alert” is to test and test regularly.

If there is a must-have feature on your data protection shopping list, it’s the ability to regularly and systematically perform recovery testing. This won’t make your data immune from threats or catastrophic events, but it will make your system more robust.

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04 May 2020

A world awash with data

On February the 20th 2020, the price of crude oil was $60 a barrel while the Dow Jones Industrial Average went above 29,000. Nearly a month before these lofty valuations, the Chinese authorities had placed the City of Wuhan under strict lock down. A few weeks after the stock price highs, the Dow crashed 30% and oil was trading below $20 a barrel.

Despite an ocean of data, the world was still awash with oil and most asset classes were hammered.

How can it be, with the incredible progress of artificial intelligence and more data than we know what to do with, our prediction engines could be so faulty? What is going on here?

Data as the new oil is a terrible analogy. For sure, the world is drowning in oil and data both. They each bring riches to a select group of companies. But their similarities pale beside their differences.

There is a finite supply of oil unlike data, the creation of which is accelerating (estimated to be 2.5 quintillion bytes per day). Oil, whilst currently very cheap, has a measurable value and can be traded as a commodity. Oil can be stored and not lose value because of it. The US government stores 700m barrels of oil in 60 subterranean salt caverns, as part of its Strategic Petroleum Reserve. At today’s prices, this oil store has a known value, roughly $14 billion.

How much are data worth?

The European Union in 2019 estimated the valuation of personal data at €1 trillion, approximately 8% of the EU’s GDP. I don’t understand the basis for this estimate and besides, it is entirely meaningless. There is no credible or trusted “Data Economy”. There is no market where data can be easily bought and sold. It does happen but with a high degree of risk to the buyer.

IBM learned that lesson. That great public relations event, the Jeopardy game show in 2011, emboldened the then CEO, Ginny Rometty, to invest nearly $15 billion in Watson, it’s artificial intelligence platform. This included $2 billion to acquire Truven Health and a further $2.6 billion for The Weather Company. IBM was acquiring data to help build commercial offerings.

How did IBM put a value on that data? Could IBM have foreseen a lawsuit in January 2019 by the City of Los Angeles against The Weather Company, on grounds of data privacy? On a return on investment basis, IBM likely paid far too much. Unlike the Oil Futures, there is no reliable Data Exchange.

One man’s rubbish is another man’s treasure.

Oil takes millennia to form and unless refined, does not change much. Data, by comparison, is easily created and is very fungible. We give most of our personal data away for free. Seemingly to us, it has no inherent value. For the FAANGs (Facebook, Alphabet etc), data are a force multiplier which is why we get free, or discounted services, in exchange.

Artificial Intelligence platforms were supposed to be the new oil refineries. Oil refineries turn crude oil into useful products we can all use, like detergents, shampoo and heart valves! What does Big Tech’s AI turn our data into? More profit for itself, through better advertising, personalisation and visual recognition.

One could argue then that the proceeds from oil are more widely dispersed than from data.  Whatever trickle-down economic benefit the general population receives from oil is unlikely to be repeated in the age of artificial intelligence. The data they have has little value to anyone but their immediate competitors. Unlike oil, data are not openly traded or exchanged. Big Tech’s monopolies will likely get even bigger and more powerful.

For most ordinary businesses, the utility value of every additional one Terabyte of data could be outweighed by the cost of managing that data. Government regulations such as the EU’s GDPR or California’s Consumer Privacy Act, are easily manageable taxes for companies like Amazon and Alphabet. For the rest of us, storing data is increasingly expensive, despite the fall in hardware prices.

A wicked problem

Being in possession of lots of data is no insurance policy against loss. As I said earlier, data do not prevent bad forecasts and unreliable probability calculations, especially when tail risks materialise, as with the Covid-19 pandemic.

Data are important to individuals and businesses, large and small. However, the value of data is highly user dependent. If business leaders are to maximise this store of wealth, first they must identify what data is most important, then assess what they want to do with it. Only then, can they quantify how much to invest in managing and protecting that data.

It is estimated there will be 180 zettabytes of data by 2025. That’s 180, followed by 21 zeros. Data on their own, do not eliminate risk or give us certainty in our decision making. If we are not to drown in data, we must first learn to ask the right questions.

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27 March 2020

Podcast: Tech operators are rock stars too!

How can we help IT infrastructure operators, better serve the developers building container-based applications?

In this podcast I’m joined by Predatar Managing Director, Rick Norgate.

We discuss the key features of the Predatar “Falcon” platform release (r11.3, March 26th), all designed to help you deliver dynamic, consumer-friendly, data protection services.

Rick also shares his passion for UX usability and good design. He gives a glimpse into the 2020 Predatar road map and how we are helping service providers, well…. better serve their customers remotely.

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23 March 2020

Keeping the lights on

Cost cutting measures proposed by Finance Directors are being assessed by Chief Executives, eager not to cut the marrow out of their businesses. The trick is not to leave organisations permanently vulnerable.

Protecting data is a task which cannot be jettisoned but it can be made more efficient. Here’s how you can preserve cash immediately by making changes to your data protection platform:

Identify waste

With the necessary tools, quickly identify duplicate, and rogue, data retention policies across your backup infrastructure. In our experience, many companies lack discipline when it comes to setting tight rules around what data to keep, and for how long. Software and hardware vendors love your inefficiency.

Switch Licence Model

Few companies have the time right now for skunkworks, or any project with an elongated pay back. Many are switching to a subscription pay-as-you-use licence model. This is a simple paper exercise and can free up cash immediately, especially if you can negotiate monthly billing terms.

Consolidate Products

Large companies are plagued with managing three or more different backup software products. When cash is king, this is a luxury few can afford. What better time to consolidate backup across Unix, Windows, Virtual, Cloud and Container platforms while taking advantage of modernising features?

Go “On-Demand” for Disaster Recovery

Recovery orchestration technology makes cloud a more flexible alternative to syndicated disaster recovery. Fast server provisioning and automated recovery from backup, make owning a second datacentre obsolete.

These recommendations are common regardless of the data protection products in use. However, if you are an IBM Storage Protect (formerly TSM) user, we can help you realise cost savings immediately.


On March 26th Predatar 11.3 will be released. Here are some of the highlights…

Self Service Registration

The team has been working on a common registration wizard for Storage Protect and Storage Protect Plus. Its never been more important to get quick insights into your entire backup environment, wherever it may be located and regardless of Storage Protect version.

A Bird’s Eye View

Talking of money saving. The new release features a new storage utilisation report, bringing together all Storage Protect and Protect Plus storage types. A consolidated report to identify and eliminate resource waste, for the following storage classes:

  • Vsnap storage
  • Disk Pools
  • Storage Pools
  • Container Pools
  • Sequential Disk

Licence Modeller

Predatar partners can access the comprehensive Licence Snapshot tool to help them advise clients on the most suitable software licence model for them.

If you use IBM Storage Protect or Protect Plus and would like more information on how to save money immediately, do get in touch at info@predatar.com or visit www.predatar.com.

 

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16 March 2020

SANs Containers, Containers without SANs

The new digital imperative

The urgency and importance given to digital transformation is natural. Faced with broken business models and digital disruption, companies have poured massive investment into agile software development. Whilst money has been no object for cloud-native projects, core IT assets have been left in maintenance mode.

Software developers are the new rock stars of IT, consuming infrastructure like the commodity it is. Spinning up whatever they need to increase the speed and agility of DevOps.

The Rise of the infrastructure developer

An eleven-year stock market bull run has ended. Corporate profitability is coming off its peak of 2019 and businesses have combined to build up over $74 trillion of debt, much of it in bonds. As share prices fall, bond prices go up and their principal payments will soon fall due. In 2020, cash is again king.

It’s imperative that digital transformation projects continue to receive investment. However, the cash saving skills of IT Operators are needed to check the profligacy, and prevent unnecessary infrastructure spend.

The Return of the SAN

Technology trends come and go, sometimes they loop back around. Twenty years ago, Storage Networks were all the rage when EMC Corporation’s share price peaked in April 2000. As storage prices came down, direct attached storage steadily killed off the Storage Area Network (SAN). Now when developers need compute, they simply order up the fastest block storage they need from their chosen cloud vendor. No wonder IaaS bills from the big vendors like AWS, Azure and Google have skyrocketed.

History tells us it can take a major change in circumstances for new technology to be adopted. We believe the current downturn will help to accelerate an exciting storage technology, which is on the verge of exploding. That technology is Non-Volatile Memory Express over Fabric (NVMe-oF, or simply NVMF).

Published in June 2016, version 1 of the protocol was designed to enable data transfers between a host computer and a target solid-state storage device or system. And be able to do this over a network. Transfer methods can be via Ethernet, Fibre Channel (FC) or InfiniBand. Put simply, the benefit of NVMe-oF is in providing the same speed and low-latency of direct attached storage, with the cost saving benefits of networked storage.

Enabling multi-cloud and cloud-to-edge. The container explosion

The need for speed in edge computing is obvious. The rise of container multi-clusters also demands fast, low latency storage solutions, wherever they reside. This new world of container workload migration will be enabled by the flexibility of networked storage. Better cost optimisation will come from the improved utilisation of shared pooling. This is what makes NVMe-oF such a compelling technology for multi-cloud and edge computing.

According to Gartner, more than 75 percent of global organisations will be running containerised applications in production in 2022, compared with under 30 percent today. With containers used in the cloud, the edge and the core, traditional IT operators with storage expertise should start to exert their influence in future data architectures.

Maybe its time for some of you storage SMEs to come in from the cold. You’re needed again, and you have some new toys to play with.


By Alistair Mackenzie, CEO
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09 March 2020

The Rise of the Infrastructure Superhero

1. There are over 150 million virtual machines in existence.

Just take a minute to think about that. The move from physical servers to virtual machines has been huge and has happened quickly. But it is now starting to slow down. A key reason for this is the invention of Containers.

2. There will be over 1 billion containers by 2023.

Containers are the new kid on the block, and businesses are starting to figure out how containers can help them become more agile and competitive. Key drivers behind this are the fact that containers are so much more portable, scalable and quick to deploy than traditional virtual machines. If businesses can get this right, it will allow them to be more reactive to customers, market trends and competitors.

3. There are over 25 million developers worldwide.

Software and data are fundamental to the majority of businesses and because of this, Developers have become the rock stars of many organisations. They are seen as the people that can give a business that competitive edge and the agility needed to thrive. But this is only one part of the picture. With businesses pushing Developers for more speed and agility, the landscape of the Data Protection & Storage administrators needs to change. Developers now want new environments in minutes, not days. Gone are times when a developer would ask for a new environment and then be content to wait for several days while it is provisioned. Now, they will use their own credit card and spin up their own environment in a third party cloud so they can get working. The impacts of this are huge as your IT, Data and Costs are out of your control. Welcome to the world of Shadow IT.

Bringing the Infrastructure Superhero out of the shadows.

Data Protection and Storage administrators are the unsung heroes of any business. It is these teams that are the last line of defence against ransomware while ensuring your data is protected and can be retrieved at any point, for any purpose. In today’s modern agile world, unfortunately this is not seen as enough. So how can these superheroes meet these new demands?

The answer is automation. Modern platforms allows for a higher degree of automation than ever before. Imagine if with the click of a button, a Data Protection and Storage administrator could provision space in an environment, create a new container, add this to the backup schedule and even restore the data from a live system into this ready for a developer to begin playing with. Now that would be a super power, wouldn’t it?


Written by Rick Norgate, Managing Director
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09 March 2020

Modernising data protection environments

For whatever reason, it might not be practical to use the existing environment to backup new workload. This could be because the new environment is distant from the original environment (on-premise vs. public cloud, for instance) or because that original environment isn’t compatible with the new workload.

This is how organisations end up with two environments running at the same time and it can lead to duplication of resources, both technological and human.

What’s the best way to cope with this?

If you’re calling on teams to support new environments, is it fair to expect them to still ensure the old one is getting fed? Alternatively, is it fair to expect a team that might have years of experience supporting an old environment to skill up and manage a new one simultaneously? Whichever way you look at this, its not simple to overcome unless you throw two separate teams at it – with the obvious cost implications.

How would you feel about a Management Portal that allows your teams to take control of both of those environments with a single view? A management portal that abstracts the software products under the cover and just allows everybody to focus on the most important task; ensuring that your workloads are protected and proving that they are recoverable.

Superheroes go to work with a Utility Belt. With Predatar in your arsenal, you can be sure that your teams can cope with the workload that is thrown at your backup environment, whether it’s the new one or the legacy one.


By Steve Miller, CTO
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09 March 2020

The Unsung Superhero

The Summons

The odds seem stacked against you, but you roll with it. It’s what you do, solve problems.

You manage the backup system. And 99% of the time a few people notice what you do. But then comes the 1% – the mission critical restore. Then they notice; this is it – the moment of truth. They’ve come to your arena, to see you perform. You won’t be embarrassed this time, you’re prepared. Like the elite athlete, you do your training away from the eyes of management.

Except you’ve not done the training. The IT Director doesn’t see your fingers crossed…

Loki

Time. It’s the only problem you can’t fix. Since the recession of 2008, you’ve faced reduced budgets and bandwidth. But you enjoy learning new skills, fixing new problems. The bigger the better, right? But it’s the time stealers that hinder you. Supplier software audits, compliance officer requests, constant security patching and client updates. And that proof of concept, for some new tech your boss read about on a flight to a swanky conference.

You’re not afraid of a challenge – you save your best work for evenings and weekends. The 1970 Chevy El Camino you’ve restored from a rusted-out shell, is waiting to be unveiled to the boys at the next Daikoku Night, Caffeine and Machine. At least they appreciate what goes into making something great.

So, the restore worked; if a little slower than expected. Self-esteem intact, you are the master of mayhem. As you do for the Chevy, a bit of performance tuning would be good preparation for the next restore. But management have moved on and its back to fighting fires, constant interruptions and performing heroic deeds. Tomorrow will bring another round of problems to tackle.

Shield

You decide to get on the front foot; become more proactive. If they won’t give you more people, maybe management will let you buy the right tool. Software, to give you back that most precious resource; time. The stakes get bigger every day. The company faces stiffer competition and margins are under pressure. More processes are digital, and any downtime is costly. Hackers, writing malware, bring a new threat they did not budget for back in 2010. You are the last line of defence. You are a data protection superhero!

But every super-hero needs support. And gadgets.

You don’t want to be embarrassed by a misfiring backup system. You need a platform to help you stay head of the hackers and clowns. Software, like Predatar, you can program to fine-tune restore performance. What if you could test multiple combinations of system restores? You could be more proactive. Setting expectations for application owners and database administrators. It’s how you really want to be measured, data availability. Guarding the business against loss.

The Joker

You need time to sharpen your axe. Time to think and time to plan. Overcoming the threats to your data in the future will require a different approach. Your enemies are smart. Be the superhero.

But who are you? Are you Batman? A superhero with no special powers. Just tough, adaptable and highly intelligent. An introvert, hiding in his cave, adapting his crime fighting weapons. Like you, he doesn’t seek the glory. When people need help, they send out the Bat Signal. Glory finds Batman. He saves the day and then disappears into the night.

You don’t run away from the big challenges either. But you need the best tools to help you beat your deadliest enemy; time. Take our superhero challenge…


By Alistair Mackenzie, CEO
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17 February 2020

“Data is the new oil” – is this really understood?

There you are, ensuring data is backed up and recoverable, but does the business still just see the activity as a cost centre and not a benefit?

Today’s data is the new oil if treated as such, organisations have amazing data stored and backed up but only look for it in the case of data loss. Imagine if you could use the data that is sitting there, using Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies data can be mined for information, insights and trends.

Let’s also look at making the data protection part of the business shine, a place where the company oil is stored, a place seen as strategic investment. Our world no longer needs to be a place of three-year capital investment out lays, based on roughly predicted data growth, with under used investment lying dormant for a significant amount of time or worse still capacity running out too soon, initiating unexpected and unwelcome additional budget requests to the board.

Imagine a world where you pay for what you use, a world where each business department pays for the IT services they consume on a monthly, weekly or even daily basis? Suddenly the IT department becomes a business centre generating its own income and operating in a lean and efficient manner.

We wouldn’t think of buying CDs anymore, why should we buy IT infrastructure, software and even hardware when it can be consumed in a pay as you go model, on site or in the cloud? So go for it, become a data protection superhero and turn your data protection cost on their head, become an income generator, not a cost centre.

Now you are a centre of excellence for data protection let’s push for even more value, we all hear the word DevOps banded around, now you are right in the middle of this exciting and dynamic world, by spinning up a sandbox environment from the backups you have an environment that can be used for development and testing on current data in a safe and secure environment, away from main business operations. Work complete, erase and move on, more value added for the business.

Lastly in your assent to a data protection superhero, take this data, spin up your sandbox environment and deploy AI to mine the data, looking for trends, insights and intelligence, this data is the super oil giving the business invaluable data on which to plan and grow with the ability to target markets, clients and costs with laser accuracy!

Congratulations, you are not only a data protection superhero, you are a business superhero.

 


By Andy Loydell,
Global Partner Sales Manager
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