Drowning in worthless data

| December 1, 2015

Companies everywhere are drowning in data. They are collecting more of it, and at an accelerated pace, while at the same time depending on it more than they have before.

Data centres are being constructed around the world to house all this information, but research shows that more than two-thirds of what is being kept is worthless.

The demand for our information management services has never been higher, as there will be more than 44 zettabytes of data in the world by 2020 (one zettabyte equals one billion terabytes).

Using current approaches, IT organisations will be incapable of managing that data – they don’t have the financial or human resources.

Companies need to be able to harness the power of their information – wherever it resides – by driving availability and revealing insights across heterogeneous environments.

While most assume that infrastructure is the answer to managing the ever-increasing amount of data, I don’t believe that approach will succeed. Rather, organisations need to focus on their information to complement next-generation infrastructure deployments.

More data does not deliver more value

Many organisations’ default mode is to simply keep storing data, but this approach is not sustainable.

Companies are struggling to get a full picture of their data and determine what’s valuable.

Making this worse, every new platform and technology adds another layer of data fragmentation across the business.

Information governance and information lifecycle management helps solve key challenges around visibility, action and control.

Infrastructure availability does not mean application availability

New technologies, like converged infrastructure or IaaS cloud platforms, can help lower operating costs, reduce complexity and improve time to market.

But applications must be up and running or business stops.

As hybrid cloud models help bring efficiency and flexibility to organisations, storage and applications can be adapted to these new models.

The demand for heterogeneous solutions is greater than ever, and a deep understanding of the total picture is required to ensure that companies stay up and running, despite the interruptions, changes and risks inherent in the cloud evolution.

Not all data is created equal

Cat videos are not the same as financial statements. As a result, backup and recovery service level agreements should be related to the value of the data.

Harvard Business School studies show that companies that use their information can quickly increase productivity by five percent and profitability by six percent.

Understanding and taking advantage of this idea brings efficiency and recovers cost. Brute-force approaches, like deduplication, simply make the problem worse.

As the world of data changes, companies and their IT organisations have new opportunities to move faster, smarter and with greater competitiveness – all fuelled by access to the right information.

At the same time, they have a responsibility to their customers, employees and shareholders to keep their business running, protect their data and drive down wasteful costs.

 

Matt Cain is Chief Product Officer at Veritas. He is responsible for leading all aspects of the product and support group responsible for Backup and Recovery, Archiving and eDiscovery, Storage Management and Information Availability portfolio. Veritas enables organisations to harness the power of their information, with solutions designed to serve the world’s largest and most complex heterogeneous environments as well as less complex mid-sized organisations.

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