PETALING JAYA: In business, data plays an important role and as the country edges towards greater digitalisation, organisations that rely on data should consider the vulnerablility of this resource.

       During the “Digital Financing: Powering a Ca$hless Economy” two-day webinar event hosted by Star Media Group, data management and multicloud platform company Cohesity shared how its services can combine disparate company data but also protect that from cyber attacks.

       Presented by both Cohesity Asean’s managing director Sheena Chin and systems engineering director Sathish Murthy, the talk centred on “Digital financing resiliency: Redefining data management and ransomware protection to thrive in the disruptive new normal”.

       Chin explained that to successfully complement digital financing powering a cashless economy, there is a need to ensure that data remains immutable and yet accessible.

       With today’s increased digital connection however, everyone is open to cyber threats.

       Organisations need to also ensure that their data platforms are scalable.

       This helps protect their huge data that is perpetually growing while giving them the economies of scale in terms of IT budget.

       “Gone are the days where we have the luxury of a big IT budget to spend, so every dollar that you invest in your IT it has to serve more data management rather than just a single product, ” Chin reminded.

       The reality is that many organisations have done well in implementing great technologies to meet demands, yet this generates huge amounts of data, complexity, with multiple silos that require intensive manpower and even other resources to maintain.

       Data created ends up in many locations, meaning they are largely fragmented and left vulnerable.

       In addition, many organisations still deal with legacy systems that can compromise the agility and flexibility needed to keep these organisations running smoothly.

       Chin proposed that for companies that plan to modernise and redefine their data management, these four criteria need serious consideration.

       Firstly, can the potential data platform help companies scale and accept huge amounts of data and is friendly on the wallet.

       Secondly, it should offer portability, to move from one site to another, or from on-premises to the cloud and back, or from cloud to cloud.

       Thirdly, it has to be immutable and lastly, during the disaster of a ransomware hit, it should be able to detect and protect the data and restore it instantaneously to minimise the downtime.

       Sathish then explained how Cohesity can help companies manage data in a multicloud era.

       With the vast amount of data being generated today, managing the flow while maintaining security is central to Cohesity’s solutions.

       He shared that the data coursing through CCTV cameras, phones, IoT devices and more amounts to about 1.7MB each second.

       Within an organisation this accumulation of data is incomprehensibly large, about 50 exabyte as of this year an amount that can fill about 2.8bil harddisks.

       In the next three or four years, this amount would have skyrocketed to 175 zettabytes.

       With the excessive data, comes the “great data unusage”, where organisations collect, process and store information during regular business activities but generally fail to use for other purposes.

       These are usually structured data from Oracle or SQL, unstructured data, infrastructural applications, video surveillance, logs and sensors, and analytical data and are usually backed up, as insurance to be used only when disaster strikes.

       Using the concept of the backup, Cohesity offers a software-defined architecture that functions as a backup software that runs on any hardware, cloud or virtual machine, plugging into all of the myriad databases and aggregating them into one central pool.

       This aggregated data provides businesses advantages such as cloning, data masking, test and development, recovery or impact testing.

       Companies can consider e-Discovery with GDPR compliance, litigation and audit searches and more.

       But the piece de resistance is its ability to detect ransomware.

       Cohesity uses AI to recognise ransomware patterns while its immutable system prevents attacks.

       It allows for mass recovery of data rapidly so the downtime for businesses is kept to a minimum.

       Companies using Cohesity whose data has been targeted by ransomware can backup, detect the ransomware and even recover their data fast.

       Some organisations use Cohesity to clone their unmasked database and replace it with a masked database with sensitivities of the data removed, yet maintaining data integrity structure for a new database.

       While the application and development teams enjoy services without paying top dollar for the highest storage technologies that are usually more expensive.

       As data responsibility is the current buzzword, reducing footprint and using data that is needed minimises the amount of data copies.

       Step up your Game. Be battle ready for ransomware with Cohesity. Visit bit.ly/areyoubattleready for more.

       Cohesity is a Terabyte Partner of the Digital Financing: Powering a Ca$hless Economy Live Virtual Conference that was held on June 22 and 23, in commemoration of Star Media Group’s 50th Anniversary. Visit bit.ly/digifinplaylist to watch the sessions’s replay.