"Information is the fundamental connecting fabric of businesses today"

According to Symantec's 2012 State of Information Survey, information costs businesses worldwide $1.1 trillion annually and digital information makes up 49 percent of an organization's total value. But, the survey also shows that 69 percent of businesses experienced some form of information loss for a variety of reasons, such as human error, hardware failure, security breach, or lost and stolen devices.

Tarun Kaura, Director - Technology Sales - India & SAARC, spoke to The DQ Channels on the importance of data for enterprise and need for Information Management Strategy.

1. Please elaborate on the Importance of data for enterprises today & the need for an Information Management Strategy.

Information is the fundamental connecting fabric of businesses today. Businesses depend on information technology and systems to run their business and help to drive new opportunities, as well as to operate efficiently and comply with corporate governance practices and industry regulations. Yet most enterprises today are not organized around information, but around infrastructure of servers, storage and applications. The result is information islands - an inability to secure and manage information consistently, leading to duplication, inefficiency and the inability to use information for efficiency and competitive advantage.

The sheer volume of information and its continued growth is one of the main root causes. Symantec's 2012 State of Information survey suggests that business data in Indian organizations is expected to grow 67 percent this year, and the average growth of data is expected to be 40-60 percent per year. IT budgets can't keep up with information growth and IT teams are expected to do more with the same staffing levels.

At the same time, failure to properly secure and manage information is landing enterprise in the news, because halting information flow means halting business. Information outages and data breaches are headline news. At the same time,enterprises have been investing in server virtualization as a way of driving down costs through server consolidation. Yet virtualization projects result in increased storage spending on Storage Area Networks, offsetting the ROI, to ensure that virtualized applications can still access the information they need to function.

Enterprise disk storage gets less costly every year, and this means storage expenses do not grow at the same rate as information growth. But this masks a growing problem: storage is consuming more and more of the data center budget because the last time storage technology kept pace with information growth was 2002. What's more, the trend in disk price performance is declining while information growth is accelerating: this is unsustainable in the current economy and will squeeze IT spending in many other areas, 2002 was the last year when disk price performance kept up with information growth, Moore's law can't save us this time.

2. What is the the current management strategy in place for enterprises to deal with the explosion of data?

The Information Management strategy in place should addresses the present workload of the enterprise as well as the customised storage needs. But, the current solution that enterprise use consists of a range of solutions that targets different parts of the information storage and management infrastructure (e.g. clustering for apps, replication for storage, backup for storage), which are not coordinated and thereby increase costs and the level of complexity. Moreover, the Symantec State of Information Survey, finds that more than a third (38 percent) of business information is duplicate, contributing to one of the top challenges associated with information management.

Indian businesses are facing huge challenges when trying to manage their information with two thirds (66 percent) saying that there was no ‘single version of truth' when it came to information- they end up with multiple versions of identical files. In addition, 63 percent of information is hard to find, further contributing to the sea of information that is challenging businesses today.

3. Please explain Symantec's perspective on Information Management.

We believe that enterprises will turn their data stores into strategic assets if they adhere to four basic pillars. The first is to protect data completely through a single data protection platform. It must provide heterogeneous support regardless of what server platforms and operating systems, storage devices and systems, databases, or applications that enterprises are running.

The second is deduplication everywhere. We take the approach that deduplication at the source is the most optimal approach, but we also recognize that use cases vary and allow deduplication at any number of points in the data protection process. The third is to delete confidently. Data should not be stored forever, and enterprises should delete data types as part of their ongoing information management practices to reduce their storage costs and their IT risks.

The final pillar is to discover efficiently. Enterprises need to be able to find what they need, when they need it. Discovery should be proactive and not reactive. It is much too expensive and time-consuming to deal with legal events reactively. Enterprises need to build comprehensive litigation-ready infrastructures - and if not for litigation, then for information intelligence.

Instead of keeping everything forever, Symantec allows enterprises to efficiently manage information by deduplicating everywhere and deleting with confidence. Instead of indexing uncontrolled information and hoping that it's still there when there is a need to find it, Symantec gets information under control, stores it efficiently and manages it for rapid recovery or discovery.

Fundamentally, Symantec allows enterprises to move away from information islands to an information management platform that is architecture and infrastructure agnostic.

4. Please share your views on the concept of BYOD in context with information management.

Imagine half the value of a business being buried out of sight; or that value residing on the devices that employees take home at night, possibly to be lost or damaged. It's a sobering thought-and one that's all too real in today's digital world. According to a Symantec survey almost half of an enterprise's information is being stored outside of its own data centre on devices beyond the corporate firewall, globally. That could be anything from confidential customer information and sales opportunities, to crucial emails and financial reports.

This ‘information sprawl' is like setting a match to a business.Information sprawl has been identified as the culprit in information mishaps. Mishaps like exposing confidential information through the loss or theft of a mobile device, as well as having problems just finding the information because of rampant disorganization.So why is it happening? Two key issues are at play here: mobility (including BYOD) and the cloud. Smartphones, tablets and the cloud now store significant business information which means business value is residing out of the enterprise's control.

To safeguard precious information assets, action needs to be taken urgently. Symantec recommends a series of best practice measures to minimize the impact of information sprawl within an enterprise. First, to mitigate risk, focus needs to be on the data-not the device or the data centre. With BYOD and cloud, information is no longer contained behind a company's firewall. Second, an enterprise must be able to separate useless data from valuable business information and protect it accordingly.

Second, establish consistent policies for information that can be enforced wherever it is located-whether it is in physical, mobile, virtual or cloud environments. Finally, be efficient: use flexible technologies like deduplication and archiving to protect more, but store less.

That final point is crucial. With so much duplicate data drifting around the enterprise owing to information sprawl, it can be tough to get valuable information onto C-level executives' fingertips for decision making. To get valuable data into the right hands quickly, enterprises need a governance plan that works: one that decreases duplicate information throughout the enterprise and reduces the risk. Three integral simple steps to help ensure that an information governance program is on the right track.

•  The entire corporate culture-from C-level to administrator-must focus on protecting the information created, shared and archived by staff. Projects and information should align with common business goals of risk mitigation and cost control, which can reduce the potentially expensive tendency to silo information.

•  Give attention to specific initiatives such as compliance, e-discovery and data privacy. With specific goals, procuring an adequate budget will be easier. Implement technologies with a high ROI such as e-discovery, archiving, deduplication and data loss prevention solutions.

• To effectively manage information, it's essential to know what it is and how vital it is to business functions. Classify current information to more easily make decisions concerning information storage, security and accessibility.