Vijay Mhaskar,
VP, Information Management Group,
Symantec India
The telecom sector has shown impressive growth In India. The increasing subscriber base has led to more storage applications at use. What role does archiving play in this regard?
FICCI predicts that the 3G subscriber base is expected to hit 90 million by 2013, accounting for 12% of the overall wireless user base. The growth in 3G adoption is expected to directly contribute towards the growth of data being generated across the telecom operators. This is due to the fact that 3G will lead to an increase in demand for entertainment (video streaming) and other hosted applications, all of which will create a massive storage crunch for operators.
Archiving, thus, enables organizations to automate movement and retention of unstructured information to improve performance, scale, and manageability of applications while reducing risk and costs associated with providing transparent end-user access and efficient e-discovery and optimizing storage.
Symantec recommends adoption of a streamlined information management approach to archive and access data. We are working towards putting data growth in its place by deleting confidently, managing storage more effectively and discovering what they have more efficiently. Our contextual solutions optimize storage and manage the information in a streamlined manner. Symantec's solutions focussing on deduplication, archival, backup, recovery are aimed at utilizing existing storage capacity more efficiently.
What all challenges and difficulties operators will face in terms of data storage?
The management of unstructured data is recognized as one of the major unsolved problems. One of the biggest issues with managing this unstructured data is that it is typically scattered on filers without divisional or owner organization, so pulling detailed billing or reporting for divisions is difficult. Also, there are issues with identifying old or irrelevant data, allocating storage to the appropriate business unit or department, and understanding data usage and consumption trends.
Another area of concern is the protection of all this customer data as one needs to keep it both for compliance and audit needs as well as for possible litigations. To ensure that it is all backed up and archived intelligently to ensure timely and safe recovery is very integral in view of such regulations. Symantec's backup and archival solutions ensure that the information within enterprises is protected and archived for future reference.
Tell us about Symantec's solutions to the present scenario with respect to archiving?
Symantec's approach to information management is built on four pillars: Protect completely, Deduplicate everywhere, Delete confidently and Discover efficiently. Symantec enables organizations to get information under control, store it efficiently and manage it for rapid recovery or discovery. We allow organizations to move away from information islands to an information management platform that is architecture and infrastructure agnostic, giving maximum agility and flexibility while at the same time deriving maximum cost benefits.
Symantec's Information Strategy also focusses on ensuring that enterprises are able to protect their entire infrastructure by using one software platform. Secondly, they can also delete confidently, which means that customers are able to think more strategically and delete unnecessary information. This ensures that customers are also protected from a recovery and litigation perspective.
Some of Symantec's backup and archiving products include NetBackup, Backup Exec and Enterprise Vault product lines. Enterprise Vault is an archiving platform that stores, manages, and enables the discovery of corporate data from email systems, file server environments, instant messaging platforms, and collaboration and content management systems. Symantec's automated and active archiving solution ensures discovery is as efficient as possible. Active archiving ensures that information is stored efficiently in the archive, and unlike other compliance approaches there is no need to make additional physical copies “for compliance reasons”. It is also centralized, making it easier to manage.
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The amount of corporate data required to be stored and managed has been growing in geometrical progression over the last few decades. The already-astonishing rate of growth shows no signs of slowing. The equally growing telecom sector in India poses a number of challenges to the telecom operators with respect to data management, especially when most of the data is in unstructured format. VARIndia talked to Vijay Mhaskar, Vice-President, Information Management Group, Symantec India, to know more on the front.
Much of the data being generated today is semi- or unstructured content comprising documents, images, video and audio clips and other data.
According to industry experts, as much as four-fifths of the data could either be deleted or moved to an off-line archive where it would be quietly forgotten. However, in the backdrop of new governance and retention compliance regulations, it is necessary that all corporate data - active or inactive, worthless or mission-critical - needs to be stored for posterity.
The telecom sector generates data every moment, whenever a call is made or SMS is sent. The increasing subscriber base can pose a number of challenges to the telecom operators with respect to data management, especially when most of the data is in unstructured format.
The Union Ministry of Home Affairs has mandated all mobile operators to store text messages for a period of six months, instead of a couple of days. This will require considerable amount of investment by operators in data centers.
As per the latest figures released by TRAI, the mobile subscriber base increased to 729.57 million by the end of November 2010 from 706.69 million in the preceding month, registering a growth of 3.24 per cent. At present, Indians send between 130 billion and 150 billion text messages in a month. Obviously, the volume of SMS's generated will be tremendous.
Storing such a heavy volume of data will prove to be quite a challenge for telecom operators. Here comes the role of archiving. The Information Management Group, a division of Symantec, provides solutions that help enterprises design their archiving strategy, design and optimize their archiving architecture and estimate storage requirements for archived information.
