Data - the growing asset created by digital transformation

3. In addition, organizations are experiencing the increased fragmentation of their data across business functions and applications. As an example, it’s thought that the proportion of cloud native, enterprise apps will more than double by 2020. Applications are coming into market fast, resulting in increased fragmentation of data across a given network, which makes old approaches to data management unsuccessful. Businesses are increasingly turning to holistic data management practices that can link data across applications and business functions.

4. Last but not least, increased and ever-changing legislation has heightened the need for effective and secure data management policies. Today, companies must save their data in accordance to several layers of compliance and legislation depending on several factors, such as where they are based or where their customers are located. What’s more, businesses must be able to access their data quickly should they be required to present it during an audit or inspection. Legislation is a complicated business, full of nuances and requirements that traditional data management practices cannot fulfill.

What does this all mean? Businesses today have more data than we could have ever imagined; they also live in several environments (i.e on-premise, multi-cloud); fragmented data; sprawling application assets; and are operating in a complex, heavily regulated environment. In reality, this means that traditional approaches to data management and protection are inadequate for the kinds of agility and efficiency that modern organizations, of all sizes, are demanding.

As a result, there is a distinct move away from these old approaches towards solutions that provide a holistic approach to data management. By their very nature, holistic data management platforms are designed to serve today’s enterprise and bring with them several distinct advantages that drive competitive edge. For example, a single view of enterprise data allows users to manage their rapidly growing data storage demands and reduce operational complexity whilst cutting costs associated with a layered data management approach. Furthermore, this new approach puts data at the heart of the organization, streamlining backup and recovery and enabling businesses to understand their data better – which are critical factors that will make or break businesses in 2018 and beyond.

The enterprises that will succeed in today’s digital economy will be those that place data at the core of their business, their operations and most importantly, their technologies. To do this, it is critical that they know everything about their data; where it is; what it is; and why it is important. Then businesses must demand simple and resilient systems that will support the seamless integration of data. What’s more, these systems must address the call to support the changing infrastructure needs of the enterprise, not to mention their growing volumes of data. This is all whilst ensuring overall governance strategy, compliance, and control across any given organization.