The use of this site and the content contained therein is governed by the Terms of Use. When you use this site you acknowledge that you have read the Terms of Use and that you accept and will be bound by the terms hereof and such terms as may be modified from time to time.
All text, graphics, audio, design and other works on the site are the copyrighted works of nasscom unless otherwise indicated. All rights reserved.
Content on the site is for personal use only and may be downloaded provided the material is kept intact and there is no violation of the copyrights, trademarks, and other proprietary rights. Any alteration of the material or use of the material contained in the site for any other purpose is a violation of the copyright of nasscom and / or its affiliates or associates or of its third-party information providers. This material cannot be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, transmitted or distributed in any way for non-personal use without obtaining the prior permission from nasscom.
The nasscom Members login is for the reference of only registered nasscom Member Companies.
nasscom reserves the right to modify the terms of use of any service without any liability. nasscom reserves the right to take all measures necessary to prevent access to any service or termination of service if the terms of use are not complied with or are contravened or there is any violation of copyright, trademark or other proprietary right.
From time to time nasscom may supplement these terms of use with additional terms pertaining to specific content (additional terms). Such additional terms are hereby incorporated by reference into these Terms of Use.
Disclaimer
The Company information provided on the nasscom web site is as per data collected by companies. nasscom is not liable on the authenticity of such data.
nasscom has exercised due diligence in checking the correctness and authenticity of the information contained in the site, but nasscom or any of its affiliates or associates or employees shall not be in any way responsible for any loss or damage that may arise to any person from any inadvertent error in the information contained in this site. The information from or through this site is provided "as is" and all warranties express or implied of any kind, regarding any matter pertaining to any service or channel, including without limitation the implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement are disclaimed. nasscom and its affiliates and associates shall not be liable, at any time, for any failure of performance, error, omission, interruption, deletion, defect, delay in operation or transmission, computer virus, communications line failure, theft or destruction or unauthorised access to, alteration of, or use of information contained on the site. No representations, warranties or guarantees whatsoever are made as to the accuracy, adequacy, reliability, completeness, suitability or applicability of the information to a particular situation.
nasscom or its affiliates or associates or its employees do not provide any judgments or warranty in respect of the authenticity or correctness of the content of other services or sites to which links are provided. A link to another service or site is not an endorsement of any products or services on such site or the site.
The content provided is for information purposes alone and does not substitute for specific advice whether investment, legal, taxation or otherwise. nasscom disclaims all liability for damages caused by use of content on the site.
All responsibility and liability for any damages caused by downloading of any data is disclaimed.
nasscom reserves the right to modify, suspend / cancel, or discontinue any or all sections, or service at any time without notice.
For any grievances under the Information Technology Act 2000, please get in touch with Grievance Officer, Mr. Anirban Mandal at data-query@nasscom.in.
The pharmaceutical industry is experiencing a rapid surge in data generation, driven by advances in research, clinical trials, and patient data collection. While this data explosion offers immense potential for innovation and improving healthcare outcomes, it also presents significant challenges in terms of managing and storing vast amounts of information. As the volume, velocity, and variety of data continue to grow, so do the costs associated with its management and storage. In this context, storage divestitures have emerged as a strategic approach to address the increasing costs of managing data in the pharmaceutical industry. By strategically offloading storage assets and leveraging alternative solutions, such as the cloud, organizations can optimize costs, improve operational efficiency, and unlock new opportunities for innovation. This article explores how storage divestitures can be a cost-effective solution to mitigate these challenges while ensuring data availability, security, and compliance. But first, we need to understand what is a storage divestiture?
Exploring the Concept of Storage Divestiture
Storage divestiture refers to transferring or offloading storage assets or resources from on-premises infrastructure to a cloud provider or from one cloud service provider to another. It involves the strategic decision to reallocate or redistribute storage-related responsibilities and resources to optimize costs, performance, security, or other factors. Storage divestiture may occur due to various reasons, such as:
Cost optimization: Organizations may seek alternative storage providers or solutions that offer better pricing models, more competitive rates, more capacity utilization or improved cost efficiency. For instance, the average cost of storing a single TB of file data can go over $3,351 a year irrespective of usage. Instead, an enterprise can leverage pay-per-use cloud storage to reduce costs.
Performance or scalability requirements: Changing storage needs, such as increased data volumes or performance demands, might necessitate divestiture. Organizations may move their storage assets to a provider with better performance capabilities or scalable storage options to meet their evolving requirements.
Vendor lock-in avoidance: Organizations may choose to divest storage assets from a particular provider to avoid being overly dependent on a single vendor. By diversifying their storage solutions across multiple providers or infrastructure options, they can reduce the risk of being locked into a specific vendor’s ecosystem.
Security and compliance considerations: In some cases, organizations may divest storage assets from a particular provider if they have concerns about security, data privacy, or regulatory compliance. They may opt for a provider with stronger security measures or better compliance certifications.
Storage divestiture involves migrating data from one storage service to another, reconfiguring storage infrastructure, and updating applications or systems to work seamlessly with the new storage provider. The process typically requires careful planning, data migration strategies, and coordination between the organization and respective service providers to ensure a smooth transition without data loss or service disruptions. Here are seven steps to consider before moving ahead with a divestiture.
Seven Steps for Optimizing Data during Divestitures
When embarking on the journey of storage divestiture, the first step is to thoroughly assess and evaluate your current storage infrastructure and requirements. This step helps you understand your existing storage environment and sets the foundation for making informed decisions throughout the divestiture process. While the assessment process itself does not directly minimize your data estate, it provides crucial insights that can inform subsequent steps focused on data optimization. By assessing your existing storage infrastructure and data assets, you can discover ways to reduce your data estate, allowing you to migrate and store only necessary data, thereby controlling data sprawl. Here are some steps to get you started
Data inventory and assessment: During the assessment, you conduct a comprehensive inventory of your data assets and evaluate their relevance and value to your organization. What and where is the data? Do I need all the data? Who has access? Is it secured and compliant? – are just some of the overarching inquiries can be addressed that can be answered during this process.
Data Classification & Tagging: This step allows you to identify, classify, tag and index data based on usage, age, access, importance, sensitivity, and legal or regulatory requirements. Metadata, content and context analytics can be used to help you gain a better understanding of data sets that can be retained (hot data), archived (cold data) or eliminated (redundant, obsolete, and trivial (ROT) data) as part of the divestiture.
Data retention policies: As part of the assessment, you establish policies defining how long different data types should be retained. This step helps identify data that has exceeded its retention period (ROT) typically due to age, access, ownership and compliance and can be safely disposed of during the divestiture process, thereby reducing the data estate.
Data archiving and purging: Implement a data archiving strategy to move inactive or rarely accessed data (Cold) to long-term storage. Archiving helps free up primary storage resources while ensuring data availability when needed. Establish proper procedures and safeguards for data retrieval from archives.
Data deduplication and compression: Implement data deduplication and compression techniques to reduce storage requirements. Deduplication identifies and eliminates duplicate data, while compression reduces the size of data files. These techniques can significantly reduce storage needs, particularly for backup and archival data.
Review data storage practices: Evaluate your data storage practices and identify opportunities for optimization. Determine if all data needs to be stored in high-cost primary storage. Consider moving infrequently accessed or archival data to lower-cost storage options, such as cloud-based object storage or tape archives.
Data lifecycle management: Implement robust data lifecycle management practices that define the stages of data from creation to disposal. Automate data lifecycle processes to ensure consistent and systematic data minimization practices across your organization.
Cloud computing plays a pivotal role in storage divestiture by providing organizations with a flexible and scalable platform for data management. Organizations can offload the responsibility of managing and maintaining physical storage infrastructure, thereby reducing operational costs and complexity. But the silver lining here is the ability to tier your data based on usage.Not only can you achieve cost savings, but you can also enhance efficiency and productivity in your core business functions by harnessing the power of high-speed computing. Let’s explore the concept of cloud tiering and its benefits for businesses.
How can Cloud Tiering help?
Cloud tiering refers to the process of intelligently categorizing and migrating data across different storage tiers based on its frequency of access, importance, and cost considerations. It involves segregating data into multiple tiers, such as hot, warm, and cold storage, and dynamically moving it between these tiers as per predefined policies.
Hot storage, also known as primary storage, houses frequently accessed and critical data that requires low latency and high-performance. Warm storage contains data that is accessed less frequently but is still relevant and requires moderate performance. Cold storage comprises rarely accessed or archived data that demands minimal performance at a significantly lower cost.
Storage Tiers: The first step is to set up multiple storage tiers based on their performance, cost, and accessibility characteristics. Typically, there are two or more tiers involved, such as high-performance solid-state drives (SSDs) and lower-cost, high-capacity hard disk drives (HDDs).
Data Analysis: Cloud tiering systems analyze the data usage patterns within the storage infrastructure. This analysis includes monitoring the frequency of data access, the size of the data, and other relevant factors. This step helps identify data that is frequently accessed and data that is less frequently accessed.
Data Classification: Based on the data analysis, the cloud tiering system classifies the data into different categories or tiers. Frequently accessed or “hot” data is placed in the higher-performance tiers, such as SSDs, while less frequently accessed or “cold” data is moved to lower-cost, high-capacity tiers like HDDs.
Tiering Policies: Administrators define tiering policies that determine when and how data should be moved between different storage tiers. These policies may consider factors like data age, access frequency, file size, or specific user-defined rules. For example, a policy might state that data not accessed for a certain period should be moved to a lower tier.
Transparent Data Movement: Once the tiering policies are defined, the cloud tiering system automatically and transparently moves the data between different storage tiers. The data movement process is usually orchestrated by the cloud storage platform or a dedicated tiering service. It may involve copying, migrating, or archiving the data based on the policies and the available storage resources.
Data Access and Retrieval: Cloud tiering ensures that data remains accessible to users and applications regardless of its physical storage location. When a user or application requests data that has been moved to a lower tier, the tiering system retrieves the data from the appropriate tier and presents it seamlessly, as if it were stored in the original location. This process is transparent to the end-users.
Tiering Optimization: Over time, the cloud tiering system continues to monitor data usage patterns and adjusts the data placement accordingly. It dynamically optimizes the storage infrastructure by promoting hot data to higher-performance tiers and demoting cold data to lower-cost tiers. This ongoing optimization helps ensure that frequently accessed data remains readily available while reducing costs associated with storing less frequently accessed data on expensive storage media.
That the contents of third-party articles/blogs published here on the website, and the interpretation of all information in the article/blogs such as data, maps, numbers, opinions etc. displayed in the article/blogs and views or the opinions expressed within the content are solely of the author's; and do not reflect the opinions and beliefs of NASSCOM or its affiliates in any manner. NASSCOM does not take any liability w.r.t. content in any manner and will not be liable in any manner whatsoever for any kind of liability arising out of any act, error or omission. The contents of third-party article/blogs published, are provided solely as convenience; and the presence of these articles/blogs should not, under any circumstances, be considered as an endorsement of the contents by NASSCOM in any manner; and if you chose to access these articles/blogs , you do so at your own risk.
Photo by Guillermo Ruiz on UnsplashUnlocking the power of Delta Lakehouse in Kubernetes is a journey through the realms of data lakes and container orchestration. In this blog post, we’ll explore the seamless integration of Delta Lakehouse into…
In today’s data-driven world, organizations increasingly recognize the value of leveraging data to gain insights, make informed decisions, and drive innovation. However, transforming into a truly data-driven organization requires more than just…
In the ever-evolving realm of technology, the convergence of cloud technology is not merely a passing trend—it’s a transformative force reshaping the landscape of innovation for enterprises. The traditional perception of the cloud as a storage and…
In the ever-evolving realm of modern business, the cloud has emerged as a revolutionary catalyst, offering unparalleled prospects for innovation, efficiency, and expansion. Developing and implementing a resilient cloud strategy is not merely an…
In today's data-driven world, organizations increasingly rely on cloud computing for their data management needs. This paradigm shift toward cloud environments presents a host of advantages, such as scalability, flexibility, and cost-efficiency,…
Virtualization is foreseen as one of the finest technologies in the IT industry. The flexibility and efficiency offered by virtualization help enterprises to scale their IT infrastructure as per the changing demands. Virtualization serves as the…
