How CDW Can Help You Upgrade to Immutable Storage
To protect your data against ransomware, natural disasters and other events, your organization should upgrade to an immutable storage solution. Immutable storage prevents unauthorized access, alteration, or deletion of data once it's written.
Data is the lifeblood of businesses and organizations of all sizes.
From critical customer information to important documents, data fuels our decision-making processes and shapes the way we operate. But as the volume of data we generate and manage continues to explode, so do the challenges associated with its storage and preservation.
In this age of data-driven decision-making, data security, integrity and accessibility become paramount. This is especially true for businesses and organizations that need to follow government or industry-specific compliance and legal requirements.
Although your primary storage systems will need to be open and available for your business processes, your backup data should be isolated and immutable to minimize the risk against ransomware and allow for a smoother disaster or cyber-recovery.
Once implemented, an immutable storage system prevents unauthorized access, alteration or deletion of data once it’s written. This means your business or organization can rest easy knowing that its data is practically impervious to tampering.
Ensure Data Resiliency Through Immutable Storage
Traditional storage systems are vulnerable to various forms of data loss, including hardware failures, software errors, natural disasters and cyberattacks. Immutable storage, which is often implemented using technologies like WORM (Write-Once-Read-Many), helps you achieve a greater level of data resiliency.
Immutable storage enables your business or organization to securely store and preserve data over extended periods, ensuring that valuable insights can be derived from historical records without the risk of data degradation or manipulation. It also helps you to comply with strict regulatory frameworks that require long-term retention and protection of data.
While any existing data on your immutable storage system cannot be altered, immutable storage is scalable, and it is still possible to add more storage at any time to accommodate the growth of your data usage.
Architect the Right Immutable Storage Solution
Our immutable storage solutions team recently worked with an organization to improve its data protection capabilities and data retention policies.
CDW leveraged Rubrik for data protection and Wasabi for public cloud storage to add almost a petabyte of immutable storage for the organization.
Our experts helped the organization set up its data retention for 24 months and created three copies of the immutable data: one for the main location, one for its disaster recovery site and one for the cloud. While immutable data cannot be altered or deleted, we helped the organization do this to safeguard against physical damage or data corruption in the event of a natural disaster.
The entire process, from start to finish, was completed in about a month. Thanks to CDW’s expertise, we can accelerate the time it takes to properly implement an immutable storage solution.
How to Begin Your Immutable Storage Journey
If your business or organization is looking to upgrade to immutable storage, the next step is to find a partner who will listen to your challenges and can advise you on how to implement a solution that fits your specific needs. CDW’s proprietary assessments can help you get started on this journey.
Our assessments can provide a health check for your IT environment, especially in the data storage and security areas. From there, our experts will be able to provide guidance around the changes needed for your business or organization to become compliant and more secure.
Before you begin the assessment process, be prepared to answer the following questions:
- How much data will need to be in immutable storage?
- How long do you need to keep your data?
- What business outcomes are you trying reach?
These questions will help guide your business or organization’s thought process around the policies that will need to be created for your immutable storage solution.
We understand that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach for immutable storage. Thanks to our world-class partner portfolio, we can architect a solution that gives you greater CapEx and OpEx flexibility.
Whether your immutable storage is on-premises or in the cloud, our experts are ready to tailor a solution to your needs.
