Realizing the Power of Enterprise Data

Enterprise data contains amazing opportunities – and massive challenges. Data has the potential to transform businesses by creating new markets, growing revenue, and driving fresh opportunities. It can also produce enormous challenges, such as data breaches that can cost a company its reputation, or loss of service issues that frustrate customers who can no longer access their accounts. By contrast, when enterprise data is properly managed, it has nearly limitless potential.

To that end, IT organizations have been embracing multiple initiatives in recent years to better align with their company’s broader business objectives, such as simplifying the IT environment, reducing costs, and embracing the cloud in order to better realize the value of their data. Savvy enterprises soon realized, however, these approaches often have unintended, negative consequences including:

• Rigid complexity is often a biproduct of infrastructure simplification within an IT environment. A key contributing factor is to this issue is implementing specialized point solutions that won’t allow an infrastructure to scale or react nimbly.
• Inefficient spend can result when organizations continually buy additional storage to address escalating data growth. However, this is often the wrong solution to the problem since the actual issue is poor data management − not a need for more data storage. The end result is that money is unnecessarily spent on storage hardware that isn’t truly needed.
• Potential data loss can occur when organizations move data to the cloud without a clear understanding of their cloud provider’s data protection responsibilities. Likewise, moving to the cloud without a well-thought migration strategy can result in unprotected data that is vulnerable to breaches.

The real issue here, however, is ineffective data management – and the realization that this is no longer merely a technology issue that only impacts IT. More organizations are recognizing that poor data management affects the entire enterprise, and they’re searching for ways to transform existing processes in order to realize their data’s value.

A recent survey by Vanson Bourne of 1,500 IT decision makers and data managers across 15 countries confirms that ineffective day-to-day data management costs their enterprises dearly by severely impacting efficiency, productivity, and profitability. This report examines that research and shares IT leaders’ candid thoughts about their data management challenges and outlines how organizations can successfully implement integrated data management.