Mass Data Fragmentation: What is it and why does it make GDPR compliance so challenging?

With increasing threat of cyber-attacks and ways in which data can be stolen, companies large and small are finding it difficult to keep their data safe and to meet GDPR policies. More than 80% of all data within an enterprise sits in backups, archives, object stores, filers, and test/dev environments. This data, sometimes called secondary data, lives in siloed infrastructure that is spread across multiple point product and locations, including on-premises and in public cloud infrastructure. In a survey of over 900 senior IT decision makers conducted by Vanson Bourne, the results showed that 87% of respondents acknowledge that secondary data is fragmented and becomes impossible to manage long term, 63% have 4-15 copies of the same data and 85% store data between 2-5 public cloud platforms. These statistics raise major questions for organizations globally: If they have all of these data copies, how can they possibly know what PII is in those copies? And, if those copies have been replicated to a host of public clouds, who is keeping track of what PII is where? As you might imagine, due to this enormous data sprawl and lack of visibility, it is nearly impossible for the IT owners to locate and take corrective action on so much personal data that they might have within their environment – quite frankly because they don’t know what data they’ve got and where it’s located. At the end of a full year of GDPR, there is adequate evidence that organizations have struggled from lack of resources and the sheer complexity of handling of data to ensure compliance.

What’s the Path Forward to Address Mass Data Fragmentation and Compliance Challenges?

The trick is to look for solutions that are purpose built to handle mass data fragmentation from the ground up. Organizations will not find their answers in point products that only address one type of workload – like backups or test/dev. Organizations need to embrace a platform that brings everything together. Cohesity provides the only web-scale, hyperconverged solution that consolidates multiple workloads including backup, files and objects, test/dev and analytics, all on one platform. As a software-defined solution, Cohesity spans across on-premises, public cloud and edge deployments, making it simple to unify and manage all data. Users also need greater visibility, analytics and of course protection to be able to ensure GDPR compliance. This is where the need for applications comes into play – applications that can run on that same platform. Cohesity uniquely allows applications to run directly on backup and other unstructured secondary data. This capability enables enterprises to download applications from Cohesity’s Application MarketPlace and run those apps to gain insights on stored data. All this happens without the data ever leaving the platform, which shrinks the blast radius for identity thieves.

backup and recovery Archives

Tag: backup and recovery

May 24, 2019

GDPR one year in: What’s stopping organizations from achieving compliance?

“Data is the new oil”, a phrase we hear too often. Organizations across the world are transacting and storing explosive amounts of data. This data includes sensitive private data belonging to their customers. The General Data…

May 15, 2019

Faster and more resilient data protection and management with Cohesity Pegasus 6.3

We’re excited to discuss another software update. Rapid and continuous development allows us to deliver innovation that helps our customers solve mass data fragmentation. With Cohesity Pegasus 6.3 we deliver a faster, more resilient, and feature-rich…

May 15, 2019

Everything You Wanted to Know About Backing Up Office 365 Exchange Online with Cohesity

Cohesity recently hosted the Tech Field Day group at our corporate offices for Cloud Field Day 5. The Tech Field Day team brought some of their top analysts to review and provide feedback around many of…

May 9, 2019

10 Things You Should Ask Vendors Claiming to Manage Secondary Storage

As secondary volumes continue to grow exponentially, backing up, managing, and gaining insights from that data has never been more important for enterprises as it is today — especially if you think about disaster recovery, compliance,…

May 2, 2019

Why O365 Exchange Online needs a backup

In the second blog of this series, we will look at Microsoft Office 365 as a SaaS Application from a backup and recovery perspective. We will look at the out of the box backup and recovery…

May 1, 2019

SaaS Apps Require Backup – Myth or Reality?

In the first blog of this series, I will be analyzing the need for a third-party backup and recovery solution for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications. To begin with, let’s look at how the backup…

April 26, 2019

Simplify Backup Acquisition, Deployment, and Operations with Cohesity and Cisco

Working with disparate solutions across multiple on-premises and cloud environments adds complexity to backup solutions. Cohesity builds solutions that consolidate fragmented backup and secondary data silos to reduce this complexity. Consolidating legacy infrastructure with modern backup…

April 23, 2019