Data Mobility

Data mobility means getting data where and when you need it. Employees today are increasingly mobile and must have access to corporate files, applications, and services. Organizations have islands of IT outside their datacenters at numerous remote and branch offices. The inability to access and share corporate information – when and where it’s needed – impacts the business from new sales, product development, and supply chain schedules to customer satisfaction. This has led the typical business worker to bring their own devices to work, procure non-sanctioned IT cloud services – or most commonly both.

As a consequence, corporate data is increasingly becoming distributed. Accessed from business and personal devices, corporate content is shared between these devices and among colleagues, customers, partners and others. Cloud services for file sharing are ubiquitous in today’s corporate settings. Not only do these services enable productivity but they also provide a workaround for file transfer size restrictions and challenges with corporate VPN access.

IT is left with a difficult decision, which is to deny or enable. Blocking cloud services and BYOD will result in shadow IT – which is bad for business, bad for IT and increases corporate risk of data loss, theft or security breaches. When end users store corporate data in unsanctioned devices, applications, and clouds, it puts the data outside the control and governance of corporate IT. Information governance and security policies can’t be enforced. And when employees exit the company, this corporate data becomes orphaned and lacks a custodian. The implications? Corporate data can end up in the wrong hands or go with an employee to a competitor.

Increasingly, IT organizations are enabling cloud services and BYOD on their terms – retaining centralized visibility and control. Astute IT organizations are authorizing BYOD and the use of cloud services – but in a secure, agile and cost optimized manner. This results in a win-win scenario where employees can use data to mobilize the business and IT enables business agility while mitigating risk and security events.

Enterprises should take action now by leveraging a hybrid cloud offering that works across private and public cloud infrastructure. While the growth of public cloud services continues, for risk, security, compliance, performance or jurisdictional reasons, many organizations are most interested in leveraging a hybrid cloud. According to IDC research, leading use cases for hybrid cloud include backup and disaster recovery, archiving, public cloud recovery, cloud bursting and collaboration. A hybrid cloud enables an organization to offer secure, enterprise-level cloud based services to their users, such as file sharing and synchronization. The service architecture should have a global access topology with support for geographically distributed data dispersal and the ability to abstract data from underlying applications. At the object level, functions such as content tagging, automation rules, encryption, advanced metadata handling, storage efficiency, analytics and intelligent search are essential to enable proper data management resulting in greater business agility, visibility, security, and cost optimization.