How to Avoid Data Drawbacks - Virtustream

How to Avoid Data Drawbacks

Minimize Inactive Data to Simplify SAP® Operations and Reduce Your Data Footprint

By Lofan Leung, Product of Strategy and Alliances at Virtustream

We’re all familiar with the term “big data,” but just how much data is there these days? Nearly too much to comprehend. According to Sigma Computing, recent statistics show that 2 trillion gigabytes of data are generated each and every day. That’s exabytes of data created on a daily basis, with estimates that the global datasphere will grow to 175 zettabytes by 2025! But who’s counting?

To put it in more relatable terms, the data generated every second in the financial industry is expected to grow 700% in 2021 alone. The truth of the matter is that the digital era has ushered in an explosion of data across all industries. Data is gold for a business. But data can also quickly become the grime that clogs the gears of business success when it’s improperly managed.

While data can boost a business to new heights, it can also lead to major stumbling blocks. Taking proactive steps to minimize inactive data in your IT and cloud environments can help you limit cloud overspending and reduce your data footprint. In addition, it can also help to avoid data drawbacks that can cause significant issues down the road, including impacting performance and data compliance.

The drawbacks of inactive data

• The performance hit: Data’s invaluable business benefits are the deep intelligence and insights it can provide to an organisation. However, inactive data that is not necessary for your business’ daily operations or was inherited, for example, from decommissioned legacy systems, can degrade system performance, causing longer analysis and processing times. Additionally, if an organisation is attempting to move applications and data to the cloud, inactive data also increases the data footprint and migration timelines, which can consequentially lead to overprovisioned resources.
• Higher costs: Maintaining high volumes of inactive data hits a company where it hurts – the budget. Storage pricing models span the storage technology itself, as well as staffing costs and related processes like managing backups. Typically, these costs have a direct correlation to the amount of data being stored and maintained; the more data, the more expensive the related storage costs.
• Related risks: If inactive data resides on a legacy platform, or on an unsupported application, it can also lead to a higher risk of non-compliance, especially for heavily regulated industries like banking or healthcare.

Archiving inactive data

Complete deletion of data is not a viable solution in many cases. Even inactive data can retain potential value down the road, for example for audit, analytical or reporting purposes. Virtustream’s cloud and SAP experts would recommend that customers leverage the powerful capabilities of data archiving services. These services enable an organisation to safely manage the full lifecycle of the archived data, helping to simplify SAP operations, establish data retention policies, lower overall data footprint and achieve other key benefits, including the following:

• Leveraging data archiving solutions can simplify the migration of SAP applications to the cloud by shrinking the overall data footprint, which helps to reduce migration requirements and ensure that data is better suited for efficient IT operations once in production. A more simplified data structure can also help improve analytical capabilities and increase ROI once in the cloud.
  
  
• Properly archiving inactive data can also improve overall system performance and response times by expediting transactions and reports. End user queries should be faster and more accurate as well.
  
  
• Data archiving can also contribute to reduced requirements for hardware, licensing, and administration costs due to a smaller infrastructure footprint and reduced storage needs. Furthermore, archived data can be stored on less expensive content management systems. By limiting the amount of data stored in active mission-critical applications, such as ERP, organisations can achieve greater system availability by reducing the execution time for cloud migration, system upgrades, backups and more.
  
  
• Keeping too much old data can introduce compliance risks. Certain data types, such as personal data, needs to be carefully managed and removed to comply with data regulations and privacy laws in the US, and parameters set by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU. Properly archiving inactive data can also reduce compliance and liability concerns.

Virtustream has helped enterprise customers migrate thousands of mission-critical SAP workloads and applications to the cloud over the past decade. If you’d like to learn more about avoiding data drawbacks, contact our experts anytime: https://www.virtustream.com/contact-us.