The Top 6 Data-Related Challenges for Digital Business
If there’s one certainty of digital transformation, it’s that data will take center stage in the new normal. With more digital interactions, more data is being acquired to provide insights to make informed decisions and intelligence to drive innovations.
For many businesses, the proliferation of data and its sources has become unwieldy—especially for those not equipped to handle it. In fact, many businesses are already citing data growth and manageability as key challenges to address in the coming years, to meet new goals and fend off new security risks.
So, what are organizations specifically struggling with as they continue to advance their digital transformation journeys? Here’s a look at the top six data-related challenges that companies must address to successfully compete in an increasingly digital world:
Silos happen when data sets and streams are isolated and can’t talk to one another. The result: chaos, duplication, and missed opportunities. They also lead to reduced visibility, lack of collaboration, and low productivity that negatively impact both customer and employee experiences.
As organizations go completely digital, agility and innovation will come from the cross-pollination of data and unified efforts. This makes silos and the availability of data a critical concern. And it’s a concern that is impacting a growing number of organizations. In fact, 57% of executives say their current storage system makes it difficult to share data across the enterprise, according to Harvard Business Review research. As reliance on data continues to grow, this percentage is likely to increase with even more executives facing the costly challenge of siloed data.
New types and greater volumes of data are being generated, stored, and consumed, such as voice, video, and sensor data. The rapid accumulation of all this data presents architecture challenges that are difficult to overcome with legacy data storage. This reality was highlighted in Bredin’s 2020 survey of IT decision makers. More than 60% of respondents reported challenges as they implemented digital experiences, and 41% said that their infrastructure wasn’t prepared to scale with their data growth.
Simply put, outdated data storage solutions were not built to handle today’s tremendous volumes of both structured and unstructured data, making it difficult to scale and upgrade to meet ever-increasing demands.
Today’s customers expect real-time engagement, necessitating employees to have instant access to information across the organization. If data is slow or unavailable at the moment of need, digital services don’t work, efficiencies aren’t raised, and money isn’t saved.
