What Is Data Management as a Service?

Instead of managing your own storage infrastructure, data management services offer a way for businesses to offload their data management overhead to a trusted third-party managed service provider. Data management as a service (DMaaS) makes it convenient for businesses to increase their storage capacity, provide lower costs for expanded storage space, improve their cybersecurity and compliance, and scale network resources—up or down—depending on business requirements. Data management in the cloud involves every aspect of storage deployment, including resource allocation, security, integration, logging, and data storage.

What Is Data Management?

The data your business collects is an invaluable resource for analytics, customer support, marketing strategies, and product inventory. Requiring administrators to support data management in-house puts tremendous overhead on their job function. Offloading this overhead to a third-party DMaaS provider saves money on administrator maintenance, real estate, hardware costs, and downtime after any failures.

Data management is the process of offloading storage and its maintenance to an outside vendor, mainly a cloud provider. The provider gives administrators the necessary tools for security, data protection, backups, recovery, scalability, and accessibility so they can configure storage to support any business application. Businesses can scale storage up or down to control their IT costs.

Offloading data management to a reputable cloud provider lowers overhead for administrators, makes it easier to implement logging and security monitoring, and reduces costs for the business. A good DMaaS provider provides all the tools necessary to manage data, including structured and unstructured data. Cloud-based storage integrates with other cloud resources, such as applications or database servers.

Types of Data Management Services

Data management is more than just storage capacity. Providers that offer data management also support various business requirements surrounding data storage. Businesses must contend with local laws, compliance, security, architecture, and integration of data. Failure to acknowledge various data management requirements can be costly, potentially resulting in fines from compliance violations, litigation, and revenue loss.

A few types of data management services include:

• Data governance: This entails support and monitoring of various national and international laws controlling the way corporations can use, sell, and handle consumer data. PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, and CPRA are just a few examples of data governance.
• Data warehousing: Data management involves consolidation and centralization of data into one location to simplify the way applications and users store and read data.
• Unstructured data storage: Big data and analytics are common for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Businesses using AI and ML must have storage capacity for unstructured data, which can quickly scale up to petabytes.
• Data security: All data management services must be configured properly to block unauthorized access. Monitoring and data protection tools oversee permissions, logging events, and alerts.
• Data integration: Tools provided in the cloud allow administrators and developers to collect data, transform it into a format ingestible for applications, and store it in an accessible but secure location.
• Data processing: Transformation of raw data into an ingestible application format is done via data processing tools. Data processing tools clean unstructured data or format data so that it can be stored as structured data in a relational database.
• Data architecture: DMaaS providers handle the hardware for data management, but business administrators must still design a strategy for storage deployment. Administrators must build a plan for the data architecture controlling the flow of data from transformation to storage.

Benefits of Data Management as a Service

Aside from convenience for administrators and the cost savings associated with cloud-based data management, DMaaS has several other advantages. The advantages depend on the cloud provider and the tools offered to businesses. Before choosing a provider, make sure the provider offers tools that can deliver the following benefits:

• Better data sharing: The warehousing aspect of data management provides a central location for sharing data. Data stored in a single location reduces data redundancy and ensures that every application and user has a centralized location for retrieving data from a single updated source.
• Tightened security and data protection: Most data breaches from cloud storage happen from misconfigurations of storage buckets. Businesses can leverage security tools when they deploy data storage solutions in the cloud.
• Backup and recovery efficiency: Because data storage is in warehouses, administrators can more easily find all data that must be included in backups. Backups are also stored in the cloud, and recovery of data can be done from a central dashboard without the need to find a viable backup file on premises.

Best Practices for Effective Data Management

While data management providers offer many of the tools to deploy and maintain storage, you’ll need to follow the right strategies to keep data secure from malware and unauthorized access. Enterprise businesses with large data silos need policies in place to ensure that important data isn’t lost or forgotten when developing security strategies.

A few tips for setting up your data management strategies:

• Add metadata to data sets: Various search features, archiving solutions, backup software, and auditing programs use metadata to categorize and index it. Metadata also helps organize your data in the warehouse.
• Design a naming scheme: Administrators should name network resources based on a naming convention that makes it easy to understand the purpose of the file or network resource. For data storage, most administrators use a convention with the date included in the name so they can quickly find backups, catalogs, and data sets.
• Configure backup policies immediately: Backups should follow the 3-2-1 rule, which means that all data should have three backup copies, two copies should be stored in separate media (e.g., network drives and cloud storage), with one of those copies stored off-site. With cloud storage, administrators could store copies on different data centers in case one fails.
• Document architecture and policies: All security policies should be documented so that they can be repeated continuously without error. Architecture is documented so that data can be found for backups, during application troubleshooting, or after a security breach.
• Follow compliance regulations: Most compliance regulations have requirements surrounding data storage. For example, GDPR requires that businesses remove data at the request of an EU consumer. California has similar requirements with CCPA and CPRA. Make sure data can be audited, monitored, and deleted based on compliance regulations.

Conclusion

Data management is a huge undertaking for any organization, but it doesn’t have to be. Offloading data management to the cloud lets you focus on configurations and your data rather than the underlying hardware. You’ll still need to design, configure, document, and maintain your cloud architecture, but DMaaS makes it more convenient.

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