Q&A: How data management can become a critical business differentiator

Why do organ­i­sa­tions need to improve the way they man­age data?

We live in a data econ­o­my and as both con­sumers and busi­ness­es we’re all active par­tic­i­pants. In the data econ­o­my, data is the cur­ren­cy. We exchange it, we trans­act with it almost every day. It’s dynam­ic and in the enter­prise it flows in and out of our organ­i­sa­tions, between depart­ments and cross-func­tion­al teams who are tasked with cre­at­ing val­ue from it. The data econ­o­my is about to under­go explo­sive growth. By 2025, humans will have cre­at­ed almost 180 zettabytes (ZB) of data — that’s up from 18ZB in 2015.

Organ­i­sa­tions are in a race to lever­age that data to gain a com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. The win­ners in this data arms race will be the ones that under­stand that they need to think about data dif­fer­ent­ly and apply new skill sets and prac­tices to the way data is man­aged and ulti­mate­ly mon­e­tised. In our recent Rethink Data report, IDC esti­mates that less than a third (32%) of data being gen­er­at­ed is actu­al­ly being used — mean­ing more than two-thirds of it is going to waste. That’s a huge untapped oppor­tu­ni­ty.

What is spurring this growth in data?

Over the past decade, we’ve wit­nessed the third major IT rev­o­lu­tion since the inven­tion of the com­put­er — the emer­gence of cloud com­put­ing, where data is cre­at­ed and cap­tured on bil­lions of end­point devices and then uploaded to cen­tralised IT infra­struc­ture. This era has been dom­i­nat­ed by hyper­scale pub­lic cloud com­pa­nies who were able to both help cre­ate and cap­i­talise on the growth of the data econ­o­my. One of the pri­ma­ry dri­vers for how these com­pa­nies were able to do this is the data itself. They fig­ured out the direct cor­re­la­tion between the accu­ra­cy of AI and machine learn­ing train­ing mod­els and the size of the datasets with which they are trained.

More data gen­er­at­ed means bet­ter ana­lyt­ics, which in turn means bet­ter busi­ness insights and bet­ter prod­ucts for cus­tomers. As Google’s research direc­tor Peter Norvig once said: “We don’t have bet­ter algo­rithms — we just have more data.”

What will be the next key data trend that organ­i­sa­tions need to focus on?

The next step is IT4.0 — the fourth major IT rev­o­lu­tion — and the rise of the edge. This is where data is processed and stored as close to the data source as pos­si­ble and is being dri­ven by the pro­lif­er­a­tion of inter­net of things devices and 5G con­nec­tiv­i­ty. No longer does data have to be sent back to a mono­lith­ic, cen­tralised stor­age cen­tre, organ­i­sa­tions can process data where it is being gen­er­at­ed: in cell phone tow­ers, on roofs of build­ings, in autonomous vehi­cles. This means organ­i­sa­tions will have access to new data sources and new, high­ly com­plex and unstruc­tured data types to man­age. At the same time, new hybrid archi­tec­tures incor­po­rat­ing mul­ti­ple pub­lic, pri­vate and geo-dis­trib­uted edge clouds are emerg­ing in order to cap­ture the data oppor­tu­ni­ty as stor­age shifts to a decen­tralised mod­el.

What are the main chal­lenges organ­i­sa­tions face when stor­ing data?

As the wealth of data grows, it will con­tin­ue to be even­ly dis­trib­uted across mul­ti­ple data centre‑, edge- and cloud-stor­age envi­ron­ments. Data growth and data sprawl are just two of the data man­age­ment chal­lenges that organ­i­sa­tions must grap­ple with as they adjust their busi­ness­es to a world of IT4.0.

One of the main rea­sons data is being under­utilised today is that the cost of enter­prise stor­age is pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive. More effi­cient, scal­able and afford­able solu­tions are need­ed for organ­i­sa­tions who are being asked to do more and store more with less. Anoth­er rea­son is that most of the 180ZB of data that will have been cre­at­ed by 2025 will be machine-gen­er­at­ed, unstruc­tured and geo­graph­i­cal­ly dis­persed.

Man­age­ment of data across var­i­ous loca­tions and mul­ti­ple clouds and plat­forms is pro­hib­i­tive­ly com­plex, espe­cial­ly for IT organ­i­sa­tions whose resources are already con­strained. There­fore data risks becom­ing siloed, strand­ed and unus­able.

How can organ­i­sa­tions best solve these issues?

To over­come this com­plex­i­ty, organ­i­sa­tions need open archi­tec­tures and new approach­es to data man­age­ment, and sim­ple, easy-to-deploy solu­tions so they can mobilise, con­sol­i­date and analyse data at their required vol­ume and speed. 

With the relent­less growth of data and the 24/7 cost impli­ca­tions of stor­ing it, today’s mul­ti-cloud solu­tions and con­fig­u­ra­tions — where each cloud ven­dor has its own unique tools, poli­cies, cost mod­els and desire to retain cus­tomer data with­in their own ecosys­tems — are not the answer to the stor­age cost and com­plex­i­ty chal­lenges. Organ­i­sa­tions are forced to com­pro­mise in the data eco­nom­ics equa­tion where the cost of stor­ing more data can seem like it out­weighs the val­ue that can be derived from it. To address this issue, we believe there needs to be a shift both in par­a­digm and oper­a­tional approach. 

Instead of a world where we only store what we can afford and man­age, we want to cre­ate a world where we can store as much data as we want. In this world, closed-off, pro­pri­etary archi­tec­tures are replaced with open, hybrid archi­tec­tures where data moves freely and effi­cient­ly across an organ­i­sa­tion, no longer trapped in silos.

What will this ulti­mate­ly help organ­i­sa­tions to achieve?

In this new world of open, hybrid archi­tec­tures, data stew­ard­ship is not con­strained with­in the bound­aries of the IT func­tion but instead democ­ra­tised across inter­de­part­men­tal teams. This is enabled by a DataOps mod­el which allows full access to dis­parate datasets, and an envi­ron­ment for AI-pow­ered inno­va­tion, paving the way for pre­dic­tive insights that dri­ve dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion and com­pet­i­tive advan­tage. 

Sea­gate is unique­ly posi­tioned to help solve these oper­a­tional and archi­tec­tur­al data man­age­ment chal­lenges. We have been a tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny inno­va­tion leader for more than four decades. Our entire prod­uct roadmap is based around the vision of build­ing a fric­tion­less future for the world’s data through open, edge-to-cloud data man­age­ment solu­tions. Part­ner­ing with our cus­tomers to reduce the cost and com­plex­i­ty of their infra­struc­ture, we enable them to store more data, cre­ate more val­ue from it and ulti­mate­ly win in the data econ­o­my.

For more infor­ma­tion please vis­it seagate.com

Pro­mot­ed by Sea­gate