Data Mobility and Freedom Maximizes Its Business Value
In today’s data-driven world, business intelligence has become king. If you can’t extract value from your data, irrespective of the source or the contents, you are starting each day behind the competition. Organizations often find themselves in this situation because their technology solutions lack the ability to offer valuable business insights. More specifically, many companies end up with data locked into storage silos (hosted on everything from traditional storage systems to fully outsourced cloud providers). However, to extract maximum value, IT leaders must provide data mobility to move data wherever and whenever business needs dictate, so it can be accessed and actioned for business benefit.
One solution is for data center managers to partner with multiple vendors, leveraging all combinations of hybrid strategies to implement solutions that can provide the flexibility required to use the valuable stored data effectively. In doing so, organizations can achieve rapid and effective adaptability and scalability—and there’s no reason the valuable information contained within those datasets shouldn’t have the same mobility, flexibility, and accessibility.
Yet, the reality is that data storage systems do not always have seamless data access and extraction, especially in a world where different vendor systems are rampant with incompatibility. In such circumstances, companies that fail to understand and manage their unstructured file and object data often end up with unbounded unstructured data silos – leaving valuable intelligence on the table.
It’s important to understand why this situation is so common.
IT executives are bombarded with statements such as “data is the new oil,” which highlight the potential bottom-line business benefits of data mining. They’re also simultaneously inundated with horror stories about liabilities and fines for companies that cannot readily produce legal or financial records for compliance purposes.
Data archiving has its own set of challenges: IT departments often struggle with handling the volume of requests for archived or backed up data, and the requests for a restore of an old version of an accidentally deleted file. Moreover, many companies are not equipped to classify and categorize their data, and do not implement a proper data migration/archival/deletion lifecycle. As a consequence, they experience unbounded growth in unstructured data. This predicament was once solved by turning to the cloud, but this solution is no longer a panacea now that customers have moved to storing and retrieving petabytes of data.
In addition to the realities of scale, today’s storage administrators must deal with multiple vendors.
