industryopinion
Data distancing – how can IT facilitate a productive remote or hybrid workforce?
Aron Brand, CTO of CTERA explores the challenges of data distancing.
T
he IT channel has played a critical role in working with end user organisations to create an effective and secure infrastructure that supports remote and hybrid workforces. As well as physical distancing, organisations have also had to
tackle ‘data distancing.’ In other words, IT teams must ensure remote workers have access to their files and other necessary data without impacting on performance or security. In this task, the IT channel plays a critical role, working with end user organisations to create an effective and secure infrastructure that will support their remote and hybrid workforces. Data distancing at a large scale across a globally distributed
workforce leads to several challenges for IT departments, including security, availability, and migration: Data security: For employee productivity, it is essential to provide easy access to file data, however that should never come at the expense of security. Te exposure of an organisation’s global data fabric to remote devices creates a security challenge as the edge locations typically do not have strong physical security. It is vital for an organisation’s chosen file system to rigorously control the data that can be accessed at each remote node or endpoint. Despite meeting security requirements, VPNs are notoriously clunky. Te answer is a mix of the two: the ability to extend corporate file systems to remote users securely while maintaining the user experience. Network latency: Enterprise IT teams today must provide high- performance, interactive data services to their remote teams, across greater distances than we have ever seen before. Network latency is directly related to distance. Tis means that if an organisation’s file storage is consolidated in a single, centralised datacentre, it is difficult to provide a high-speed user experience. Traditional file storage solutions were not designed to manage the
latencies and connectivity issues stemming from wider enterprise data topologies. In a remote and hybrid world, file data must be located close to the users to ensure a “local” file access experience. Tis can be achieved by manually moving the files, or preferably, by strategically deploying caching devices (more on this to follow). Balancing consistency and availability: Distributed data fabrics differ in the levels of consistency they provide and in the ways they approach inconsistencies, for example in a situation where two users are simultaneously editing a file. One method, known as the “eventual consistency” model, handles inconsistencies by creating a conflict file. Other solutions implement strict global locking, at the cost of availability and latency; a global locking service oſten becomes a single point of contention and is not accessible during network disconnections. Tis trade-off between consistency and availability is
18 | December/January 2022
described as the CAP theorem, which states you can have at most two out of Consistency (C), Availability (A) and Partition Tolerance (P) in any distributed storage system. Migration: Migration from legacy systems to modern file solutions is a significant challenge for any enterprise organisation. To ease migration difficulties, organisations must employ a solution with strong migration tools that allows for the retention of security settings such as Windows ACLs and backward compatibility with existing filers – by exposing the data using the ubiquitous SMB and NFS protocols.
Five top tips for data distancing When approaching the challenges of data distancing, keep in mind the following tips: 1. Anywhere availability: Data must be accessible to authorised users from anywhere and, as a result, global file systems are increasingly being adopted. In a global file system, files are cached at the edge (either at the endpoint or using regional caching nodes) to ensure low latency access from anywhere. Caching provides for partition safety to allow nodes to work offline in case connectivity is lost, and to re-synchronise once connectivity is re-established. Tis synchronisation also ensures business continuity and facilitates global collaboration among remote users. 2. Security: It is critical to employ a zero-trust approach. Tis is where remote nodes and endpoints can only access a strictly controlled subset of corporate information with explicit permission, rather than being granted access to the entire infrastructure. 3. Cloud bursting: Cloud bursting is oſten employed by organisations seeking to expand on-premise storage capacity without deploying additional on-premise storage infrastructure. Cloud bursts for compute can also overcome some of the difficulties of data distancing by enabling the heavy data crunching to take place in the cloud, away from the edge device, which then improves local performance. 4. Dark data: Enterprises must corral their dark data on unknown bring-your-own and work-from-home devices, and ensure it becomes a thing of the past. Enterprise data should be at the fingertips of all of employees, everywhere, at all times. 5. Agility: Solutions that enable agile collaboration on data between remote workers are critical. Tis enables users, wherever they are, to access the same file shares quickly and efficiently. Remote and hybrid work models are here to stay. And with the
right data distancing tools and technologies, enterprises can maintain performance requirements as well as existing access control and security models to ensure productivity for their distributed workforce.
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