The Hindu Business Line : NetApp sees big scope for unified data management

WITH growing threats of identity theft and information security breaches, enterprises are taking to a unified storage management approach with emphasis on data security by encrypting and addressing retrieval aspects, according to Network Appliances.

The Senior Vice-President, Product Management, Network Appliance (NetApp), a $1.6-billion data storage solutions provider, Mr Suresh Vasudevan, on a visit to India, told Business Line that certain recent incidents such as the Visa credit card information theft and security breaches in business process outsourcing companies have brought back focus on security.

Banking and financial services and healthcare sectors are particularly seeking ways to address the issue by bringing in what is referred to as unified data management solutions and building encryption into retrieval system.

This means that irrespective of where the data is hosted and the form it is in, the Chief Information Officer must be able to provide access to information, as if it were a single centre.

While this is one aspect of data management, the challenge is to build necessary securities into the whole system to ensure that only authorised persons have access to this information. This means, the retrieval of information and access to vital company data is rules-based, offering limited access.

Independent research studies reveal that when information resides as islands in an enterprise, it makes managing such information an extremely tough and costly proposition. It is here that uniform storage solutions help both by creating an ideal disaster recovery facility and also making it convenient to manage and retrieve data, Mr Vasudevan explained.

Irrespective of where data is stored, be it in the form of tapes or disks, encryption allows only authorised persons to access information. After the acquisition of Decru, NetApp sees a major opportunity to expand this market and consolidate it further.

Banking and financial services companies, healthcare sector, hi-tech companies, particularly business process outsourcing companies and Government sectors present a huge opportunity.Apart from this, several regulatory aspects such as Sarbanes Oxley, HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 ) compliance, are also driving the need for storage consolidation.

The Asia-Pacific region has emerged as one of the fastest growing markets. The storage market is estimated at about $50-60 billion.

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