If you’re like many customers I meet, one thing is clear: data is the lifeblood that drives your business. Yet the reality is that only a small percentage of companies are ahead when it comes to prioritizing data. This is an urgent directive for IT organizations, with the potential for positive results if you are ready to act now.
Let’s look at some of the paths to becoming data first.
Identify what is holding you back
First, look for obstacles that might be holding you back. Once you recognize your biggest challenges, you can start transforming your organization into a truly data-driven enterprise.
Here are some questions I ask clients on this specific topic. As you consider your current state, the answers to these questions will help you recognize where you are:
- Treat yourself to a data infrastructure self service who supports your stakeholders who use data and the underlying data infrastructure to propel you forward?
- Are manual IT processes and ongoing firefighting time consuming focus on strategic business priorities?
- Is your data stuck in different silos, making it difficult to access and manage?
- Do you provide data, applications and data infrastructure on demand to your business, including critical applications? Are you delivering them in an always-on, always-fast way to meet today’s business demands?
- Can your data move freely from edge to cloud?
- And finally, can you protect your data against modern threats like cybercrime – including ransomware?
When you think about all of these questions together… it’s more broadly known as data stewardship (the ability to store, access, move, and protect your data throughout its lifecycle at as you derive value from it). Data management issues vary from company to company, but it’s the complexity that you have to pay attention to.
It’s time to tackle the complexity of data management
To shed more light on this important topic, HPE recently asked ESG to examine both how organizations are tackling the complexities of data management and what benefits top performers are realizing.* Their findings from 750 data professionals computing were revealing, starting with the complexity of data management.
If you’re wondering if the complexity of data management is real, the answer is a simple “yes.” In fact, ESG learned that of the 750 survey participants, 68% say the complexity of their IT environment is slowing down digital operations and initiatives. What’s more alarming: 74% of respondents agree that their data management capabilities can’t keep pace with business needs.
Business leaders and IT managers are well aware of the need – and benefits – of being data-driven as key to their digital transformation success. That’s why data-driven modernization is essential for today’s business. But a complex web of fragmented software and hardware, comprising disparate management tools, infrastructure silos, and manual processes, hampers transformation journeys. This complexity – which takes the form of complicated procurement processes, rigid provisioning cycles, siled data, constant firefighting, etc. – is what IT managers need to tackle and eliminate first.
According to this same study, there are clear advantages to putting data first. ESG has found that organizations that are data-driven leaders are:
- 20 times more likely than less mature organizations (called nascent) to beat competitors in the market by several quarters.
- Data-driven organizations have generated 49% more innovation over the past year that fledgling organizations
- They are twice as likely to recover ransomware faster in a few minutes.
From mitigating risk to accelerating business to happier stakeholders, putting data first has measurable results for both business and IT. Yet ESG found that only 13% of respondents could be considered data-driven leaders. So if you’re like most, there’s probably work to be done to become data-first. This is where we naturally come back to the importance of simplifying the complexity of data management.
The game changer – an operational experience in the cloud
In trying to overcome complexity, IT managers are now turning to the cloud model – so much so that 91% of IT managers in this ESG study agree that mature on-premises cloud operations are the most important step in eliminating complexity .
The on-premises cloud operational experience is the ultimate game changer. The benefits of the cloud are well known: self-service, pay-as-you-go, scale-on-demand, and more. We’re not talking about moving to the cloud here, it’s about getting a cloud experience for all your apps and data everywhere. That’s why, for Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), our goal is to integrate a cloud operational experience across our entire storage portfolio, including simplified data management, self-service and available on-demand, enabling you to achieve service delivery and mobility from edge to cloud.
Once the cloud operational experience is fully in place, business owners and developers can scale faster than ever, businesses benefit from application-centric operations, and infrastructure effectively becomes invisible. Remember, simplifying data management with a cloud-based operational experience is just one key to accelerating data-driven modernization.
How to get there – 3 essential things to do
Below are three ways businesses can accelerate transformation by simplifying data management, all with the goal of putting data first:
- To accelerate data-driven modernization, you need to eliminate the infrastructure management complexity that continues to slow you down. And that’s precisely what makes the next generation of storage-as-a-service offerings ideal, delivering self-service agility and cloud operations on the hybrid cloud.
- Empower your applications and infrastructure with AI: An AIOps engine helps streamline IT operations. Your data centers, colocations, edge facilities, and private clouds can have applications and services delivered at the click of a button. An AI-powered infrastructure can prevent applications from being interrupted and unavailable, not to mention providing resources that scale seamlessly to adapt to your elastic needs. This gives you more time to focus on the areas that drive your business forward.
- Modernize data protection: You need peace of mind that your data is protected, quickly recoverable, and always secure. Specifically, you need ways to protect end-to-end data and improve business resiliency. HPE’s Hybrid Cloud Backup-as-a-Service, Modern Data Protection Platform, and Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery Service with Zerto, an HPE Company, gives you the flexibility to modernize data protection, from rapid recovery to ransomware protection to long-term data retention. — either on-premises or in the cloud.
Still don’t know where to start? I suggest you take 5 minutes to assess the maturity of your data management. Whether you’re well into your digital transformation journey or just starting out, it’s helpful to understand your progress toward simplifying data management and putting data first.
- Dive a little deeper into the importance of putting data first. Why Being a Data-first Leader Matters explores the cloud operational experience in depth.
- Become a data-driven leader. Take a 5-minute data-driven maturity assessment to find out where you are, assess your progress towards becoming a data-driven leader, and get tips for closing the gaps along the way. At the end of the assessment, you can download a personalized report with recommendations for advancing your data management maturity as you move toward data-driven leadership.
Finally, don’t wait. Find a partner you can trust and discuss ways to simplify data management today to get you on the road to data. No matter where you are in your transformation journey, know that partners like HPE are there to help you every step of the way.
*ESG Data Management Maturity Study, commissioned by HPE, November 2021
About Shilpi Srivastava
Shilpi is the Data Services and Storage Marketing Manager at HPE. With experience spanning cloud services, data storage and cybersecurity, Shilpi is passionate about technologies that help businesses innovate and succeed. Shilpi previously led cloud and container solutions marketing at Pure Storage and held product and technical marketing leadership roles at Micro Focus and JP Morgan Chase. She holds a Bachelor of Engineering from India and an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin.
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