Companies and organizations must understand that cybersecurity risk is a systems problem that must be addressed at the root level.
With systems becoming more and more complex, and handling significant amounts of data, the need to be proactive is more important than ever. Additionally, many edge computing devices have more influence over operations, meaning I/O performance is a major factor in security.
While cyber-attacks on big corporations like Equifax and Marriott get the attention, small and mid-sized businesses have just as much, if not more, to lose. According to the US National Cyber Security AllianceOpens a new window , an estimated 60 percent of small companies will go out of business within just six months of a cyberattack.
Cyber security risks exist within and outside organizations. IT departments must secure the storage and transmission of mountains of information. That data is housed in diverse locations and an ever-growing number of devices.
This “data tsunami†has made older security measures obsolete. Many IT professionals at small and mid-sized businesses think that hardware is the only option to manage data and improve I/O. This is not the case—while new hardware can help, there are software solutions.
Implementing software that reduces input and output can improve performance dramatically by doubling the throughput of storage and servers, including SQL servers.
Look at software to solve your big data performance issues instead of buying new hardware. With a software solution that eliminates “noisy†I/O that is nothing more than inefficiency and overhead, more of the data can be assessed for security risks, making cyber security solutions far more effective, while boosting application performance.
The fact is, more IT budget is burned on expensive storage solutions than is actually necessary. IT professionals and cloud providers typically turn to more expensive storage solutions if performance is bad, because often they lack the expertise to tune their current workloads to provide the required level of performance. Throwing more money at the problem is a quicker fix and allows them to get on with their other work more quickly.
But solutions exist that can handle storage performance at the operating system, file system and application levels—for example, software on cloud-hosted Windows machines that reduce the storage I/O traffic by at least 30% to 50%. This allows the current storage solution to perform better for the applications running in the cloud, without the need to consume storage hardware from a more expensive storage tier as the first or only solution. This is a more cost-effective system improvement that also improves data security as the applications would be running more efficiently—the lack of which can be the end of your business.