Tarmin discusses its unique approach to data storage | Video

Transcript

Data overload may not be an obvious problem affecting businesses, but it’s become one of the biggest pitfalls stifling growth. One company helping others to rise to the challenge of data management is Tarmin Inc. President and CEO Shahbaz Ali discusses how Tarmin’s unique solution Data Defined Storage is helping organisations with data storage and compliance.

World Finance: Now, unstructured data of course has led to the overload I just spoke of; can you tell me how are companies being affected?

Shahbaz Ali: If we look behind the curtains, at what’s actually happening in data, it’s actually unstructured. And when we say unstructured, it’s that the data is coming from various sources. So you know, for example, a sensor in an oil and gas well is producing data which is only understood by oil and gas applications.

And if we look at trading systems, they’re producing a difficult, different format. And if you look at retail banking… they’re all producing different types of data.

How do you actually manage that? This is the fundamental problem and challenge that companies have, and it’s growing: 80 percent, much faster than the traditional data that we’ve seen from databases. And this is a huge, huge challenge for companies, moving forward.

World Finance: Are particular businesses more vulnerable than others?

Shahbaz Ali: Absolutely! Some sectors like healthcare, oil and gas, and financial services, are more affected.

You look at oil and gas, you know; 30 years ago, when you were getting data from an oil well, it was less than 1TB. Today, if you actually try to get a survey of one single oil well, you can actually see that this is going to be almost 300TB. Which is absolutely a huge number, in terms of just the data.

Some sectors like healthcare, oil and gas, and financial services, are
more affected

And for those exploratory companies, data is significant.

But we see that this problem is slowly beginning to affect all industries, including retail banking, for example, and the retail sector in general.

World Finance: So how does Data Defined Storage offer a solution to these issues?

Shahbaz Ali: So we looked at the industry, and nobody was actually focusing on the data. Everybody was focusing on the media.

We said we want to focus on what the companies are struggling with. And that’s data. Which is why we actually created a solution that we called ‘Data Defined Storage’.

And what Data Defined Storage allows you to do, is it actually allows you to reduce the cost of storage, where the data lives. Any storage, it doesn’t matter. It’s media-independent.

And the second thing it allows you to do, which is quite a big problem, is the compliance and security associated with data. Because in a lot of regulated industries – healthcare, financial services – compliance is a big issue.

And finally, we also want to monetise the data. So we want to get value from the data – for a healthcare patient authority, for example, it’s very important for them to know what sort of drugs patients are taking. And for a retailer, it’s very important to know what shelf space is actually more useful for consumers.

And also, you know, the approach to storage management, data management, allows you to tap into the big data, which is basically understanding the data. Monetising the data. If you understand the data, you can grow better.

World Finance: So is Tarmin’s approach unique, or are other companies offering similar solutions?

Shahbaz Ali: Tarmin’s approach is fairly unique, but you know, the architecture we’re actually offering is very much mandated by other people in a very different umbrella. Like software-designed storage, like object-storage technologies.

We differentiate ourselves from those people, in that we are focused solely on data. So from that point of view, Tarmin’s approach is fairly unique, and we’ve seen the Gartner Group, IDC, industry analysts like ESG and Taneja Group have already validated our approach compared to the approach from large players like EMC, VMWare, including IBM and other players.

And we are positioning ourselves in a different way for enterprise accounts and enterprise customers, because we feel that enterprise customer requirements the pinpoints, that really need the innovation to go into the data, to understand the data, and to actually comply with the data and also the requirements that they have today.

World Finance: Now how can you guarantee that a company’s data will be held securely?

Shahbaz Ali: So there are regulations. And then there are organisational policies that basically allow you to secure your data.

However, compliance is a driver that basically – it’s a very people-oriented function. How do you access the data? How do you audit the data? How do you know who accesses the data? It’s very important from a legal, compliance, as well as an HR perspective.

The current approach is again, to focus on the storage box. It’s like work on a storage box: you secure the storage box, so it’s secure. Whereas we believe that that approach is very old, hence the reason that our product, and our solution, allows you to integrate transparently into that.

Companies are now seeing the growth of the data is absolutely huge

We provide SEC compliance. We provide FSA compliance. We also provide encryption that complies with the federal rules of security provided by FIPS 140. And this security, when it’s integrated with identity management techniques, provides you with a very secure approach to data management, that basically isn’t available anywhere in the industry today.

World Finance: What’s on the horizon in terms of data storage issues?

Shahbaz Ali: Companies are now seeing the growth of the data is absolutely huge. And the argument always is that you know, storage is becoming cheaper and cheaper. It’s really the human cost that’s actually the bigger issue, in terms of operating expense. Because at the data grows, you also need more full-time employees to manage the data. And the significant problem is, how do you actually secure your data, that we covered earlier on.

And that’s also bound with compliance. For example in healthcare, the healthcare authorities have to keep the data for 21 years! You know, typical disc life is five years. How do you actually do this?

So this basically has to be driven by an intelligent software solution.

And finally, everybody is actually looking at big data. You know, they want to basically improve their revenue targets. They want to basically look at how employees are more productive in the companies.

This is becoming very important from a storage and data perspective. How do we actually handle that?

So I think this is what is really for storage industry and data industry actually lies ahead: to work with chief data officers, to create really innovative solutions like Data Defined Storage, that will basically address the customers’ pinpoints.

World Finance: Very exciting updates; thank you so much Shahbaz.

Shahbaz Ali: Thank you very much for providing this opportunity.