Discuss the impact of flash and ‘the cloud’ on enterprise storage environments a

Question

Discuss the impact of flash and ‘the cloud’ on enterprise storage environments as a whole. You should discuss the success factors contrasted with the pitfalls that companies experience when adopting various strategies. Describe the impact to new/existing system designs when alternative solutions are introduced into the data center (whether onsite, or in the cloud). Finally, identify key security concerns that must be addressed with any enterprise level technology.

Note: You should address storage technologies issues such as security, onsite vs offsite, flash vs spinning media etc. Flash and cloud should be discussed in general is not focus of this paper. The goal is for you to think beyond where we are today and discuss where enterprises are likely headed and that impact. Again, the focus is on newer technologies impacting today's business environment.

Explanation / Answer

Solution:-

Introduction -

The storage technologies used in today's scenario in business environments are very secure and high ended. As organization and companies are need to store their importent information and data they use evolving technologies to upgrade the storage benefits. there are many organizations are availabe which provides thestorage services. The technology which is used should be secure and efficient to hold data. As the information stored is importent and sensitive for the company so along the storage technologies the security is also a major concern.

The organizations are related to differet industries are looking for the different technologies to control storage and their data. Traditional storage solutions still have their place, but new methods are allowing to take the benefits of IT withmore flexibility in how they design their storage solutions, and flash is one of the most popular options. alongwith Flash storage the cloud storage is also a much used storage technology.

Flash storage and cloud storage -

The organizations across a number of industries are looking at different ways to control storage and their data. Traditional storage solutions still have their place, but new methods are allowing IT shops a lot more flexibility in how they design their storage solutions, and flash is one of the most popular options. If we observe the today's IT environment in an organization we found new echnologies for storage and security of Data, New delivery models, such as virtualization, the cloud and software-defined storage are changing the landscape. The emerging new technologies, such as in-memory databases and flash storage, has many IT organizations rethinking their storage options, especially for business-critical applications.

The cloud storage is extensively used storage technology. Cloud storage is provide storage space to organizations and companies to store their data. The cloud storage provided by some organizations for example - Amazon cloud services. The service provider provides the space to companies to store their data online. The data is stored on servers which are remote location for the companies and data is sored and accessed online.

While we talk about Flash storages it's fast performance user experience in the background is even better than the performance they had with physical devices and definitely better than spinning disks or even hybrid storage solutions. This type of technology has become one of the big change factors which now enable successful company's deployments. Higer performance does not implies high cost for Flash storages. All-flash solutions are revolutionizing resource utilization and reshaping the economics of the data center.

Data storages strategies -

Here we discuss about the data storage strategies which are extensively used in today's scenario. The above given two technologies Flash Storage and Cloud Storage is wiely used technologies in data storage for an organisation.

Cloud storage is used whre the company needs extensive data space to store their large data. So they take storage services from the providers as Amazon cloud services. The data is stored on the cloud storage means the remote servers store the data and also provide the security mechanisms to protexct the data from unauthorized access. The data owning company can store dta online and can access the data also online from remote servers. This strategies is beneficial to the companies as their data is at a safe place and no one can intercept the data. And company can also access and modify data anywhere and anytime.

The Flash Storages are also a widelky used data storage strategy, which is used where fast data transaction are required. Inthis technology the data is stored locally on the flash arrays inside the company. So data is secure also and the company can manage the high performance flash data storage system locally. The cost is also optomum for the Flash data storage technology.

So both teh technologies Flash storage and cloud storage highly impact on the today's bisiness environment in terms of better servie with better security. In future these technologies are further evolving and new technologies are embedding with these data storage technologies. The new security protocols and policies are wmbedding with these technologies to provide secure transmission and access of data in a secure way while using these storage technologies.

The three considereration are important while chossing a storage technology.

Flash storage: The applications require the extreme performance acceleration achievable with all-flash storage. The flash storages are used where fast access is needed.

24/7 access to shared resources: The data storage has to support back-end work, such as backup, replication and maintenance operations, while simultaneously serving data to applications and end users. With backup and maintenance windows either shrinking or disappearing entirely, the storage systems must be able to handle everything at the same time.

Unpredictable workloads: Service-oriented IT models provide less visibility into the workloads running on the infrastructure, creating more and bigger spikes in activity. The data storage has to be sized to handle such spikes and still deliver a predictable quality of service for business-critical workloads.

The benefits and pitfalls :-

Cloud Storage -

The Cloud storage provide an online storahe so the availibility is 24x7. Cloud storage provides the security mechanisms. Large data can be stored on remote servers. The cloud data services provide high end storage services.

In some case the access to the data is not fast as it depend on the netwoprl communication. Dtat is stored on the remote servers so toaccess the data online the network bandwidth should be sufficient. The cost is not optimum for this technology as company has tp pay to the service provider for the storage service.

The flash Storage -

The flash storage is also widely used technology and it is used for fast data transactions and the cost is also optimum as the flash arrays are located inside the company so no payment should be released to any servic provider for the data storage.

In some case the flash system can be crashed so the backup server should be maintained. Company has to introduce the security poloicies itself for the dta security. So data security is also a concern for the company while using the flash storage technology.

The key concern technologies for the data security :-

In this section we discuss about the data security only. While the data is stored on the remote or local servers it needs a high end security mechanisms. Here below we discuss some security concerns of an organization which faced in today's scenario.

Below are the top five concerns that we address in client engagements:

1. Lack of an over-arching enterprise security architecture framework. There is a consensus that enterprise security architecture is a methodology for addressing security concerns at every and each architecture domain (business, data, application and technology) and layer of abstraction (contextual, conceptual, logical, physical and implementation). However, the practical experience shows that the existing enterprise architecture and security architecture frameworks are not quite there yet.

2. A need to transform the security organisation. Information security has been traditionally dealt at the information security management, operational security and solution design level, resulting in lack of alignment with both business and IT and operational imbalance. Our approach to resolving this issue is what we call “architecting a security organisation”. We define the security capabilities starting at the governance level through architecture and planning to build, delivery and monitoring. We position the security capabilities as a subset of the business reference model to give understanding of how they fit within the organisational units, business functions and processes.

3. Enterprise-wide regulatory and internal compliance. The increasing number and scope of regulatory requirements can affect the products and service delivery. At Enterprise Architects, we use enterprise architecture to resolve conflicts between business objectives, internal compliance requirements and regulatory and legislative requirements. Gaining clarity around what these are, what are their conflicts and how are they affecting the core business capabilities facilitates business decision making.

4. A need for business-outcome-focused and risk-driven security reference architectures. In our enterprise security architecture framework, risk and business objectives are the key drivers for the selection of security controls. As this is a top-down approach, it ensures that all policies and controls are identified and owned.

5. Data privacy concerns in relation to emerging trends and technologies, such as cloud, BYOD and mobility security. The key challenge here is not around infrastructure architecture and design, but around gaining clarity and resolving conflicts in relation to data privacy requirements, threat and vulnerability vectors and business objectives. The architectural approach to security allows one to gain clarity around the aforementioned, at the business, data and infrastructure security level.

Now we discuss some Key technologies for the data security.

1. Hardware authentication

The inadequacies of usernames and passwords are well known. Clearly, a more secure form of authentication is needed. One method is to bake authentication into a user's hardware. Intel is moving in that direction with the Authenticate solution in its new, sixth-generation Core vPro processor. It can combine a variety of hardware-enhanced factors at the same time to validate a user's identity.

2. User-behavior analytics

Once someone's username and password are compromised, whoever has them can waltz onto a network and engage in all kinds of malicious behavior. That behavior can trigger a red flag to system defenders if they're employing user behavior analytics (UBA). The technology uses big data analytics to identify anomalous behavior by a user.

3. Data loss prevention

A key to data loss prevention is technologies such as encryption and tokenization. They can protect data down to field and subfield level, which can benefit an enterprise in a number of ways:

These technologies are a big impact on the today's business environment as it is a upgrade in data services and Security serrvices.

We can also expect to see several emerging technologies focused on monitoring various aspects of the cloud to assure SLAs are met, and therefore we are likely to see a number of start-ups enter the market that are focused on providing management services. We will also likely see more and more value added resellers and systems integrators expand their offerings with similar capabilities and expertise. Over the coming 12 months, as more large companies start to migrate their production workloads into the cloud, we can consequently expect to see some rethinking around cloud strategy once trust in the reliability of the cloud sets in.

or some time now there has been a great deal of hype around flash storage, and more recently, software-defined storage, both of which are viewed by business leaders as viable alternatives to legacy disk-based storage. Therefore, regardless of what makes best sense for the business, enterprise IT will receive pressure from company decision-makers to adopt and build dedicated flash storage environments. The pressure on silod IT teams that are expected to deliver better performance and capacity in the face of falling budgets will increase.

Converged solutions are a more nascent category of technology than flash or the cloud and, as such, they are likely to mature over the next year. It’s hard to discuss convergence without mentioning the momentous changes to the traditional data storage giants.

Related Questions

Navigate

• Browse (All)
• Browse D
• Subjects

Integrity-first tutoring: explanations and feedback only — we do not complete graded work. Learn more.