Disaster Recovery Journal Winter 2022

These gaps result in vulnerabilities and open the door for bad stuff, such as suc cessful cyberattacks or damage caused by a rogue employee. Data silos compromise your overall data security posture and place you at greater risk. With unified data management, you can gain better oversight and control of your data and, from there, build solid security, backup, and recovery strategy. You can also mitigate another downside of data silos: distributed, disparate data which doesn’t provide you with the business insights you need. What is unified data management? It’s a way of bringing together disparate data sources to establish a unified data narra tive. When your data remains in silos, you don’t have the clear, overall data picture you need to run your business best. There might be a valuable piece of data stored in some silo somewhere that your leaders don’t see and, therefore, can’t use. So unified data management is the goal. But it’s not easy to get there because it’s a complex task to merge disparate data systems. To begin with, the technolo gies companies use to store data are frag mented. There are thousands of software and hardware vendors, all with their pro gramming languages, vocabularies, syn taxes, and practices. Add to this the fact that data comes in many different forms. There is big data and small data. There are structured, unstruc tured, and multi-structured data. Some systems can handle certain kinds of data, and datasets can vary markedly. Indeed, most data ecosystems are as complex as the United Nations, with just as many dis agreements. It is a problem because data assets fuel today’s businesses. They power your ability to make more informed deci sions about strategy based on actual rel evance and actionable insights. For this reason, unified data management should be a key initiative for every business. Here are three ways to get started on your uni fied data management campaign. 1. Consolidate vendors From data storage, backup, and recov ery point of view, consolidating on a single data-management vendor will help

Unified Management Is Key to Securing Your Data and Building Business Success By AHSAN SIDDIQUI O rganizations can gain tremen dous value from their data. They can glean business insights, make better decisions, foresee trends, recognize opportunities, anticipate customer desires, and stay ahead of com petitors. ing and analyzing it efficiently to gain the necessary insights. Unified data management helps them do both. For starters, it closes the vulnera bilities created by data silos and inefficient data management. For the past 20 years, organizations have deployed best-of-breed solutions from network security to antivi rus to backup and recovery. Many com panies manage these systems separately, creating data silos and huge operational gaps. To do all this, they must do two things. They must keep their data safe with an air tight approach to backup and recovery to prevent downtime and minimize data loss. They must also use their data well, manag

38 DISASTER RECOVERY JOURNAL | WINTER 2022

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