Gagan Gulati, the General Manager of Data Services at NetApp, discussed with me why data is the proverbial ‘king’. This included the development of data protection, governance, and cybersecurity.
“When it comes to ransomware attacks, it’s all about real-time ransomware detection. Because the sooner you can detect that there’s an attack, the sooner you can respond to it.” Gulati commented.
As we know it, businesses are pivoting to hybrid and multi-cloud environments, the challenge of protecting and governing data becomes paramount. Gulati emphasized the significance of data in contemporary digital infrastructure. “Data is crawling,” he remarked, highlighting the burgeoning influx of new workloads and AI applications. These advancements, though beneficial, also escalate the peril of cyber threats.
“Our customers are in the data journey. They are hybrid today, multi-cloud. Pretty much all our customers have data on all types of clouds today. At the same time, data is crawling. New workloads, AI is coming in. At the same time, cyber threats are a big deal.”
Gulati observed, setting the stage for a detailed discussion on NetApp’s role in addressing these growing concerns. hEffective data governance mandates a profound understanding of what data remains within an organisation’s ecosystem. According to Gulati, many enterprises lag in this domain. Through his interactions with clients, Gulati recognises a recurring issue; companies often possess vast amounts of data without clarity on its composition or relevance.
“You have to know your data before you can govern your data,” he asserted.
NetApp is positioned to aid companies in navigating these complexities. As part of the company’s commitment, they have made products like Blue XP classification available for free, ensuring organisations can embark on their data governance journey.
“They may have temp files sitting in a storage unit with, let’s assume, petabytes or terabytes of temp files, which you can delete because they were 10 years old. But they are afraid. They don’t know what their data looks like.” Gulati continued.
AI and continuous data classification and the future of data governance.
Continuous data classification becomes easier to manage and to govern. The AI technology not only aids in understanding the data but also ensures it’s accessible to the right stakeholders.
“The power of Blue XP classification is that it’s continuous, and it’ll tell you what’s going on all the time.” Gulati explained.
