FEATURE
to give you better storage options and promote better data hygiene . Essentially , where possible businesses need to create some standardisation across their environments , making data more uniform and portable and mapping and categorising it so they know what they have and what it ' s for .
The ( constant ) security question
Finally , it ' s crucial when building and capitalising on data portability that security is not left behind . Of course , improving security can ( and should ) be a motive for moving workloads in the first place but if you ’ re migrating workloads to optimise costs this must be balanced against security considerations . Security needs to be part of the data hygiene process , so teams need to ask : ‘ what do we have ?’, ‘ what things do we not need ?’ and ‘ what are the critical workloads we absolutely cannot afford to lose ?’. Beyond this , continue to patch servers and when moving data to colder storage , remove Internet access when it ' s not needed .
Having backup and recovery processes in place is also key when moving workloads . To come full circle , having easy data portability is also important for Disaster Recovery . In a critical event like ransomware , the original environment – be it a cloud or on-premises server – is often unavailable to recover damaged workloads ( via a backup ) as it is typically cordoned off as a crime scene and the environment might still be compromised . In order to recover quickly and avoid costly downtime , workloads sometimes need to be recovered to a new temporary environment , like a different cloud for example .
As organisations strive to manage their IT environments and avoid financial and cybersecurity surprises , it ' s important to constantly assess what data and applications you have and where they are kept . But to manage this and adjust as needed , businesses must build with portability in mind . By doing this , businesses can create a more agile and cost-effective cloud environment and will find it easier to bounce back and recover from disasters like ransomware . �
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