Data Modernisation - Are You Prepared for a Digitally-Driven Reality?
Find Out The Four Areas You Need to Focus On
Today’s IT leaders want to transform their organisations into more agile, efficient, and evolutionary forces inside their respective businesses.
It’s a hard task—given that most organisations are dealing with a complex mix of legacy IT infrastructures, massive amounts of data, and the pressures to leverage more modern approaches such as mobility, cloud, and the ever-growing number of interconnected devices.
Indeed—Gartner predicts that by 2020 more than 30 billion devices will be connected to the Internet1 and for the wise CIO, that spells opportunity if one can be agile and flexible enough to seize it.
To become “digitally driven” is to capitalize on this growing ecosystem of interconnection and embrace a broader set of technologies such as cloud, IoT, mobility and business analytics. What unites all these technologies though is the data. Leveraging the data you already have and capturing a wider set of data to make better, faster decisions is what being “digitally driven” is all about.
A necessary step you should be focusing on is data management. According to Gartner, a data and analytics platform is critical in transforming to a digital business.1 When adopting such a data and analytics platform, it is necessary to concentrate on four main pillars for good data management:
Security: With a business falling victim every 11 seconds to a ransomware attack by 2021, the security of your data should be paramount 2. Security measures such an encryption for data at rest and data in motion are absolutely necessary in for being digitally driven in today’s world.
Integrity: Because data is being used to drive your business, ensuring the continued consistency and veracity of your data is critical. Any data driven organisation should employ error-checking and validation processes to ensure integrity. Currently, according to KPMG, 62% of senior executives think the responsibility for poor decisions based on bad data lies with IT, so you’d better make sure you have measures in place to ensure the integrity of your data 3.
Resilience: Data resilience often refers to the availability of the data that is needed in a production environment. There are several technologies which can help assure data availability or resilience, including logical or software replication and hardware or disk replication. Both should be a part of your data resilience strategy when setting up a digitally driven business.
Capacity: Some analysts predict there will be 96 zettabytes of digital content by 2020.2 That means storage must be flexible enough to handle a wide variety of data and also varying storage sizes for your data. You should include a variety of storage methods including block storage, file storage, and object storage as part of your storage strategy.
Each method has its place in a digitally driven organisation. Favouring one over the other may not make you as flexible as you need to be when it comes to your data management stance—and the key here to focus on accurately anticipating your capacity demands so you are getting the most efficient use of your storage resources. Software-defined storage approaches can help increase both your capacity and flexibility when it comes your storage.
Of course—it is critical that all data that’s driving your organisation have robust backup and disaster recovery strategies. Modern approaches to data management take a more intelligent approach to both backup (BU) and disaster recovery (DR)—often monitoring things like data temperature (how frequently data has been accessed) to gauge the importance of the data and therefore changing the backup method and DR locations appropriately. After all, not all data is equal when it comes to running your business and BU/DR should be flexible and intelligent enough to know what data is the most critical to your organisation.
If you find yourself struggling with your organisation’s data management strategies and evolving into a more digitally driven business, you’re not alone. Regulations such as General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) are requiring stricter controls on not only how data is shared, but also under what protections it is stored and used.
Under the Australian Privacy Act 1988 organisations are required to notify affected individuals and the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) when a data breach is likely to result in serious harm to individuals whose personal information is involved in the breach 4. The latest incident occurred on June 28, with MYOB’s cloud-based AccountRight Live product. Its automated payroll program accidentally emailed 220 individual payment summaries to the wrong people 5. Imagine seeing your boss’s pay summary? That could be embarrassing!
Additionally, automation, machine learning and AI are on the forefront of revolutionising how we manage and use data to drive our businesses. The first step in becoming a digitally driven organisation is to thoroughly understand where your data stored, and how it used, protected, and managed.
Given the broad reach and complexity of the problem, it’s not a bad idea to enlist a trusted advisor like Team Computing to help create realistic data management roadmaps and execution plans across key IT domains such as storage, cloud, and backup and disaster recovery. Our experts bring both the expertise with technologies that many IT departments don’t have, and the experience of deploying them across a variety of customer environments.
So when it comes to data modernisation, our team of Consultants can help you avoid pitfalls and wrong turns, and ensure you not only maximise your IT investments, but lay the foundation to build a digitally-driven business.
Sources:
Gartner. (2019). Gartner CIO Leadership Forum 2019.
Cybersecurity Ventures. (2019). 2019 Official Annual Cybercrime Report
KMPG International (2018). Guardians of Trust Report
https://www.oaic.gov.au/privacy-law/privacy-act/notifiable-data-breaches-scheme
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/myob-privacy-breach-wrongly-emails-220-people-527720
