As everyone attempts to become a digital business, data becomes more crucial in driving business value. But protecting that data has become increasingly important — and it’s not just about backing data up anymore. It’s about managing data through a full lifecycle and finding new use cases for all those assets residing within the data.

“I have been talking to customers for many years, especially on the data protection context,” said Rama Kolappan (pictured), vice president of products at Dell EMC. “As you know, the complexity of the customer environment is changing quite a bit, and it’s a very dynamic environment. Whether they want to actually manage the data or protect the data on-prem, in the cloud, hybrid, etc., the type of workloads has become pretty complex as well.”

Kolappan spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed data management and protection and the ways Dell EMC is addressing these issues (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

The key factors in data management

One reason data management is becoming more complex is because data is growing at a rapid rate. Some companies Kolappan has worked with have seen increases in their data from 50% to 80% within just one year. Major events like ransomware attacks or downtime issues are also becoming more of a problem, because having data go down for any period of time can be increasingly detrimental. Businesses are looking for solutions that can actually help them manage these problems — thus the term “data management,” according to Kolappan.

“It used to be data protection is an insurance copy — you should be able to restore it and you should be good,” Kolappan said. “But customers … already are protecting the data. They expect that they use that copy for multiple use cases. I’ve seen a lot of customers spinning up a copy for dev-test use cases, whether it’s on-prem or in the cloud.”

Dell EMC has found three specific ways to tackle the complexity of data management, according to Kolappan. Performance is a key factor, and Dell EMC has built-in flash with their disk-based appliances for catering to use cases like instant access and instant recovery for databases.

Scale is another huge factor. Businesses are looking for scale, and they want to be able to start small and replace and grow their data domains into hundreds of petabytes if necessary — which Dell EMC has worked hard to offer, according to Kolappan.

“The third part is the reliability part,” Kolappan stated. “That actually is very important for customers, because this is the last resort for them — this is the last copy as part of data protection, and customers rely on Dell EMC for that.”

Watch the video interview with Kolappan below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE