Steve Leeper, VP Systems Engineering and Marketing, and Carl D’Halluin, Chief Technology Officer of Datadobi, met with me recently to discuss data, unstructured data management, data migration, the company, and those poor little orphaned files and data left in storage long after they had useful life.
I’ve been writing about the company’s products for about two years. Datadobi is about to celebrate its 13th birthday. Organically funded, management expects it to be around for some time to come.
The occasion of this conversation was release 6.2 and an upgrade to the recently announced StorageMAP product—a multi-vendor, multi-cloud data management platform with the introduction of capabilities to discover and remediate orphaned data.
Orphaned data is owned by employees of a company that are inactive but still enabled on an organization’s network or systems. These datasets, which can amount to a significant part of a company’s total data stored, represent risk and cost to every organization. Any enterprise with a large employee base, normal to high attrition rates, or undertaking merger and acquisition (M&A) activities will be vulnerable to orphaned data. Orphaned data is mostly not of value to the organization and creates liability due to its unknown content. Eliminating orphaned data enables IT leaders to reduce cost, lower carbon footprint, and lower risk while maximizing value out of relevant unstructured data used by active users.
With the new capabilities, StorageMAP can identify data sets with high amounts of orphaned data, allowing IT leaders to group and organize the data independent of the business organization. The orphaned datasets can then be migrated, archived to a lower-cost platform, or deleted by StorageMAP. The platform provides an easy-to-read, granular report on the top users with orphaned data and for additional detail, a search function allows targeted searches to be executed across part of or the entire data estate.
The 6.2 release comes after Datadobi launched its StorageMAP platform earlier this year. StorageMAP provides a single pane of glass for organizations to manage unstructured data across their complete data storage estate on-premises and in the cloud. This latest update enables IT leaders to fully take control of orphaned data on their networks.
“Due to the scale and complexity of unstructured data in today’s heterogeneous storage environments, enterprises can easily lose track of orphaned data within networks and open themselves up to excess storage costs and risk,” said Carl D’Halluin, CTO, Datadobi. “StorageMAP’s new capabilities allow for a seamless experience identifying and taking the appropriate action on orphaned data to give IT leaders peace of mind.”
“As data proliferation continues, IT leaders are going to see more orphaned data on their networks. This is why it is so important that organizations turn to unstructured data management solutions like StorageMAP to find datasets associated with inactive users and take the appropriate action,” said Craig Ledo, IT Validation Analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG). “Combined with a high level of cross-vendor knowledge, years of real-life experience, and great customer support, enterprises can let StorageMAP do the heavy lifting when it comes to orphaned data.”
