MSPs now have a data intelligence and automation resource to help their customers better manage their unstructured data, no matter how fast it’s growing or where it resides.
The Downside of Backup Best Practices
At the companies I've worked at previously, we’d educate end users on the importance of scheduling both full and incremental backups. We’d also emphasize the importance of the 3-2-1 Backup Rule for complying with certain stringent retention policies. While they’re both still nearly full-proof solutions for preventing data loss, they’re also easy ways for generating redundant, obsolete and trivial (ROT) data at multiple locations on-premises and offsite.
The problem is that after many lifecycles of multiple backup and migration journeys, organizations are left with massive data swamps comprised of unstructured data. Most of this data lacks any value. In many cases, the data also contains personal identifiable information (PII) or other sensitive information that’s vulnerable to unauthorized users.
The Negative Impact of Data Growth
Compounding the issue is the fact that data ─ particularly unstructured data ─ is growing at an aggressive rate. As data sets grow, they can have a negative impact on organizations’ backup and storage strategies, as well as data retention policies.
A recent research article from IDC predicts that global data creation and replication will grow to an annual rate of 23% over the next forecast period, leaping to 181 zettabytes in 2025. That’s up from 64.2 zettabytes of data in 2020 ─ a ten-fold increase from 6.5 zettabytes in 2012. Imagine if a company has a data retention policy of five years on-premises and its data is growing at a rate of approximately 20%. It would need to revisit its data backup and storage strategies much, much sooner to avoid excessive storage costs and other issues.
The MSP Opportunity
With limited budgets for huge data center expansion and infrastructure purchases, organizations are seeking providers who can deliver “as-a-service” solutions to address the unstructured data management issue. The good news for the MSP community is that those already providing OpEx-friendly service offerings, such as Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS) or Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS), have the potential to pivot quickly to solve customer data clean up needs.
The reality is that 80-90% of the data serviced by these MSPs today is unstructured. Combined with rapid data growth, this unstructured data makes it difficult for organizations to comply with backup retention policies.
Fixing the problem isn’t simply a matter of adding capacity, but there is a solution: the Aparavi Data Intelligence and Automation Platform.
The Aparavi Data Intelligence and Automation Platform finds customers’ ROT data and sensitive data ─ no matter where it resides. This enables MSPs using The Platform to help their customers make intelligent decisions as to what to do with this data.
Aparavi’s platform can also clean data and archive it to off-site targets such as public cloud or object storage-compatible targets. Doing so can reduce a customer’s on-premises storage footprint by up to 40% and make its data less vulnerable.
The Aparavi platform offers MSPs and their customers numerous other benefits as well. If you’re an MSP and interested in learning more about The Platform and how you can leverage to benefit your customers – and your own organization, learn about the Aparavi Advantage Partner Program. Or, contact Adam Smith, Director of Partner Sales at Aparavi.