Once upon a time data lived in the data center. Now data lives everywhere.

You have data in the data center, data at edge locations used by remote offices, data on mobile devices, and data in the cloud. And when a business has data in the cloud, it usually doesn't mean just one cloud.

Chances are good that you have data in SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and other applications, clouds, and systems. Organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid multicloud strategies. So, some of your data might live on AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and/or Microsoft Azure.

All this signals the need for a new approach to data management, a next-gen solution — one that gives the power of choice to an organization to design a data management strategy that best meets its unique business needs. At the same time, the entire process of data management must be simplified. The era of multiple legacy point solutions to handle a company's data needs cannot meet the needs of a modern enterprise that must manage, protect, and derive business value from its data to compete and succeed.

Understand That Distributed Data Creates New Mobility and Security Implications

When your data lives in many different places, there are several implications.

You need to address data logistics — or how to get data from one place to another. In some cases you are moving data to the cloud. But sometimes you may want to repatriate data, which involves moving data back from the cloud.

Additionally, you have to rethink your approach to security. When all of your data lived in your data center, you could protect it with a hard perimeter around that data center. But because data is now everywhere, your security model must change and adopt zero trust principles.

Now you need to manage data everywhere in a way that is efficient and effective. Your data management approach should start with protecting and backing up your data. This will help you to recover if you have an outage or you are attacked by ransomware, which is growing at an alarming rate.

Take Responsibility Rather Than Assuming That Data in the Cloud Is Safe

You may think that when you put data in the cloud it is automatically protected. But just because your Microsoft 365 implementation is in the cloud, it doesn't mean Microsoft can bring back your data if things go wrong. Microsoft 365 retains customer content for 30 days at most.

Microsoft, Google, and AWS may offer guarantees related to their cloud services' uptime and availability. But you are responsible for making sure your data is secure and accessible for compliance, legal, and other purposes. This is known as the cloud's shared responsibility model. Under this model, you are responsible for your data — even if an employee mistakenly or intentionally deletes that data or you fall victim to ransomware or another type of cyberattack.

But not everybody operating in today's hybrid multicloud world understands that because SaaS and IaaS are relatively new models, and many IT operations teams and other talent responsible for resiliency aren't fully aware of the limitations and risks cloud poses when it comes to your data.

Avoid Creating More Silos By Taking a Centralized Approach

Your database provider may tell you that its database provides native online backup. But that is a siloed approach that adds complexity from a broader operations perspective rather than enabling modernization and simplification.

The best way to avoid silos is to implement a centralized data management solution that protects and lets you manage your data — in the cloud and on premises — using a single administrative interface.

Be Aware That As-A-Service Disaster Recovery Is An Effective Option

You may choose to back up all of your cloud, software-as-a-service, and on-premises data using a self-managed backup solution. But now data management companies also offer additional resiliency via disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) solutions. This means you now have the flexibility to choose between managing everything on your own or letting your DRaaS provider focus on managing the infrastructure, while you focus on the policies that will govern your data — where the value resides.

Whether you choose to manage your own infrastructure, consume as-a-service options, or adopt a flexible hybrid approach — as more and more organizations are choosing — make sure that your data management solution addresses all of your needs, wherever your data resides.

By consolidating "one off" solutions and adopting a next-gen data management platform approach you can simplify complexity and lower the costs involved with managing your data. At the same time, this approach will allow you to follow an operational strategy that is best for your business while helping you to avoid data mobility problems, and letting you recover faster when disaster strikes.

Now you can more easily protect your data. More importantly, you can protect your business.