Archiving comes to the rescue of Growing Telecom Sector

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.

For more contact: Deepak Singh / edit@varindia.com