Empower your business with Data Lifecycle Management
Dealing with the data explosion
IDC research estimates the total sum of enterprise data will reach almost 9 zettabytes (ZB) by 2024. One zettabyte is one trillion gigabytes. By 2025, the total worldwide sum of data is expected to reach 175 ZB. This unprecedented rise in data volume is overwhelming for businesses, especially those that rely on outdated legacy systems.
As more information is captured, more resources are needed to store, manage and extract value. Companies need to do more than just cope with this waterfall of information. They need to think strategically about managing it cost effectively and extracting value from it to improve their business.
The right strategy for dealing with data
Start to think about data from its creation to its deletion. This is called Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) — a comprehensive way of managing data right across the organisation. Effective DLM guarantees your data has three characteristics.
Integrity:
Data must be accurate and complete to be useful. You need a single source of the truth and to be assured that data isn’t being replicated unnecessarily or siloed.
Availability:
Data needs to be available to the right users and at the right time to support the business. DLM provides the necessary policies to ensure information is readily available for all users.
Security:
Financial information, personally identifiable information or any sensitive business data needs protection to avoid direct business loss and reputational damage.
The 5 stages of data lifecycle management
1. Creation/acquisition
When data is created or acquired, it enters the data lifecycle. Each data item needs to be classified and categorised — with labels such as ‘financial’, ‘internal’ or ‘sensitive’ — so that the subsequent management and processing elements are easier to achieve.
2. Storage
How a business stores data depends on that data’s intended use. If it needs to be accessed easily and reused, faster storage media is required. If data is rarely used but necessary to keep for a set amount of time, or to copy for backup purposes, less expensive storage can be used. Businesses also need to be able to easily store and access different data types, whether structured data or unstructured video, image and document data.
3. Processing
The processing stage is when raw data is cleaned and made ready for use and analysis. This can include a variety of operations to transform, organise, filter and aggregate the data.
4. Consumption: sharing and usage
In this stage, data is made available to specific and defined users in a business to allow them to perform their jobs effectively. This is the stage when analysis takes place — for example, data mining or machine learning to help businesses make better-informed decisions.
5. Archiving and disposal
Not all data is necessary for day-to-day operations, and some can be archived for later investigation. Archive storage environments are separate from live storage environments, though archived data can be restored or accessed should the need arise. That can be supported by quickly moving archived datasets back into live analysis.
Finally, it is important to have a process for disposing of data. It is an inefficient use of resources to hang on to data when it no longer has any use for the business or when it has passed the required length of retention. And not doing so could well be a breach of data laws such as the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The benefits of data lifecycle management — how cloud can help
Cloud solutions offer businesses a flexible way to better manage their data and avoid being overwhelmed by the wealth of information they are constantly accruing. They come with another advantage as well: whether using basic services for storage or compute, or more specialist applications, businesses can pay for only what they use and eliminate costly IT investments.
Cost saving
If resources are well managed, the use of cloud can bring about great cost savings. Because cloud is based on a consumption model, organisations pay only for what they use. Applying your DLM strategy using cloud helps to manage IT costs, with data classified according to when and how it is needed. For example, to help manage the use of instances, fast storage is required, while data that requires infrequent access can be stored on slower, less expensive storage media.
Risk mitigation
The delivery of high-quality data helps organisations to improve the decision-making process for employees. This has a knock-on effect on the services that organisations provide to their customers, partners and stakeholders. Using cloud makes it much simpler to comply with regulations and legal issues and thereby helps to avoid fines and penalties.
Agility
The cloud offers an almost instant ability to scale and grow without upfront investment in IT hardware and software. Businesses can extend their IT infrastructure in just a few clicks and reduce the need to manage and maintain outdated on-premises IT systems and monolithic applications. Cloud services allow businesses to get the most out of their data.
Data sovereignty
Using DLM enables organisations to have much more control over their data and to institute better internal data governance practices, as well as meet legal and regulatory compliance requirements. Data replication is also a much easier and more cost-effective process to safeguard against disaster. Additionally, cloud providers offer a range of security certifications, offering extra peace of mind for customers and for regulators.
How OVHcloud helps manage each step in the data lifecycle
OVHcloud supports organisations throughout the entire data lifecycle, helping them to manage the flow of data. We provide a wide variety of services, including storage and managed databases. We also offer additional services to help businesses extract the maximum value from their data.
01
Creation/acquisition
OVHcloud helps businesses of all sizes in the data acquisition stage and can support any IT environment by connecting to our wide range of database services. Extend your existing on-premises IT environment or support both hybrid cloud and cloud-to-cloud setup. You can link your own databases to ours to handle any type of information, from web static to sensor data to all of your pertinent business data.
02
Storage
An effective data storage approach is the foundation of strong data lifecycle management. Once data is created, it needs to be stored and protected. OVHcloud offers a wide range of storage services to suit all your needs for capacity, availability, security, performance and, importantly, access frequency — all at competitive price points to give you more agility and flexibility.
Because data needs to be retained throughout its lifecycle, we offer robust backup and recovery processes to give you peace of mind that your key informational assets are safe with us. Our storage services are aimed at supporting all your business needs at any scale.
Standard Object Storage – S3 API
With object storage, you can store data in buckets as objects (rather than as files or blocks). This type of storage is perfect for large volumes of unstructured data such as images, videos and audio files, for example.
High Performance Object Storage – S3 API
A scalable object storage service designed to manage large data sets with intensive read and write operations.
Public Cloud Block Storage
File storage is a method of storing data to host and organise files in a hierarchical structure of directories and subdirectories. This type of storage is ideal for structured data such as files, web content, and collaborative work.
Enterprise File Storage
Enterprise File Storage is a NetApp®ONTAP® Select software-defined storage solution managed by OVHcloud.
03
Processing
OVHcloud has a number of solutions to support the processing of data. Our Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) offering adds maximum organisational flexibility, with a wide array of cloud-based servers for MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB. These can be used to extend an existing on-premises IT architecture or for a complete cloud-based setup. Like all cloud services, our DBaaS is scalable and follows an operational expenditure (OpEx) approach, so you pay only for what you use. And as a managed service, it removes the need for time-consuming database management.
04
Consumption
Querying your data is made easier with our Logs Data Platform. Using a powerful virtualisation tool, Elasticsearch, you can monitor your data environments via dashboard. Our platform also offers an Index-as-a-Service option to help you query and store complex documents, reports and logs.
Logs Data Platform
Harness the potential of your data quickly and easily with our analytics and decision-making tools, like big data solutions powered by Apache Hadoop, and data processing tools with Apache Spark.
05
Disposal and archive
Not all data is mission-critical, but it does need to be stored, accessed and made available when necessary. OVHcloud supports the need for long-term retention of data for all kinds of business needs.
Cold Archive
File storage is a method of storing data to host and organise files in a hierarchical structure of directories and subdirectories. This type of storage is ideal for structured data such as files, web content, and collaborative work.
OVHcloud for every step of your data lifecycle journey
OVHcloud offers organisations the ability to scale and manage the entire lifecycle of data, helping you to extract maximum value from your data and achieve faster growth. Our solutions help to reduce IT costs, offer full reversibility, support business agility and ensure your data is always protected.
