Innovation Heroes: Why do we need resiliency in data storage?

In 2019, a cyberattack brought the City of New Orleans to its knees. Within hours, city IT officials had shut down thousands of servers, virtual machines, and computers. They needed to test, cleanse, and store all city data elsewhere to prevent further attacks.

“They actually were told by the national guard that they needed to build a new infrastructure,” says Andrew Miller, Lead Principal Technologist of the Americas, Pure Storage. Within days, new equipment was on site and data was migrating to Pure Storage – who replaced the entire storage footprint.

On this week’s episode of Innovation Heroes, a podcast by SHI, Miller talks to host Ed McNamara about the unsung heroes in data storage: those defending against cybersecurity attacks, building new infrastructure, and supporting AI innovation.

Miller explains how New Orleans was able to recover “dramatically fast” with help from the FBI and CIA. He outlines the conversations he has with customers about resiliency – what he calls the intersection of disaster recovery and security. He also touches on the changing landscape of storage and cloud in 2024, including current ransomware trends.

“Cloud started out as — everything’s going to the cloud. Cloud only,” says Miller. “And then it was maybe cloud-first, and then it moved into cloud, right?”

He notes that the cloud wasn’t necessarily built for enterprise features. Different cloud providers have different levels of maturity for enterprise customers.

“We are now into this maturity level of seeing a mix of public cloud and hybrid cloud,” says Miller. “Just about any customer out there is probably in some ways in a multi-cloud environment.”

Miller provides tips for data protection, developing security frameworks, and getting buy-in for security spend.

“Attacks can be an existential risk to the business,” he says. “You start to map into the costs of downtime, the reputational and organizational damage, and customer revenue loss, those numbers get really big. It’s often about gently, not in a pushy ambulance-chasing scary way, illustrating how bad this could be.”

Listen to the full conversation to learn more about the future of storage. You can also find episodes on SHI’s Resource Hub, Spotify, and other major podcast platforms, and on YouTube in an all-new video format.

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