Data is a vital resource and businesses need to utilize it properly. Unfortunately, most businesses are finding it difficult to extract actionable intelligence from data in order to gain a competitive advantage. This is due to the fact that businesses have aggregated data lakes over the last ten years.
A data lake is a centralized repository that can hold all of your structured and unstructured data at any scale. This strategy has resulted in a massive increase in unstructured data, which is difficult to store, manage, and interpret due to a lack of schema and structure.
As a result, a data swamp has formed, consisting of a flood of dark data with unrevealed security holes, making data management difficult in both data centers and the cloud. Also, sensitive data such as PII (Personally-Identifying Information) or payroll frequently falls into the dark data category, resulting in increased security risks and compliance issues.
To unleash the full potential of data, businesses must realize its value as well as the risks associated with it. With the help of this, they will be able to optimize their organization’s environment, reduce its threat surface, and alleviate all associated risks.
The more the businesses go the digital way, the more data and data lakes will be impacted in a variety of ways.
Data dynamics
- Data silos: Business requirements are on the rise, and organizations are resorting to the latest technologies to cater to their needs. As a result, data is present everywhere such as in hybrid, multi-cloud, remote, and distributed environments. Technology sprawl also causes workloads and data fragmentation, resulting in data silos and making data recovery more difficult.
- Increased danger: Cyberattacks are also increasing along with the evolving technology, and as per Gartner, there is a possibility that 75% of IT organizations will be under cyberattack by 2025. Data leakage, data breaches, unauthorized access, and ransomware are all increased when data access, control, and security are inconsistent across environments.
The risks increase when enterprise data is stored in silos and there are no consistent security policies in place across them. As data travels around the world, so do the opportunities for hackers.
- Strict adherence: Because of the distributed workforce, expectations for privacy regulations and compliance, like GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), have skyrocketed. Such requirements are becoming increasingly strict in highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare.
- Inadequate automation and efficiency: As the company grows, automation and integration of various data systems become increasingly important. This, however, cannot be accomplished in the absence of a comprehensive approach to data recovery, data security, data management, and data compliance.
While data challenges will become more difficult in the future, businesses must drive advancement and insights with minimal business risk in order to succeed in today’s digital era.
Data Management for the Future
Today’s more energetic and visionary IT decision-makers are implementing a comprehensive data strategy that can unify data management and protection across hybrid/multi-cloud and on-premises environments. A strategy like this helps to reduce the impact of data sprawl while also ensuring rapid data recovery at scale.
A future-proof data platform with multi-layered protection capabilities can aid in the protection and rapid recovery of an organization from security threats such as ransomware and data breaches, while also controlling access to critical data.
For instance, a financial services technology and service provider attributes their ability to stay ahead of organizational dark data to the use of an intelligent data services platform. They were able to ensure the security and compliance of critical bank data while storing it securely. It enabled them to backup data from multiple sources, run compliance searches, and perform deduplication to increase storage capacity across their entire enterprise.
Similarly, a leading manufacturer of a premium line of commercial vehicle lighting stands firm in its belief in the ability of intelligent data platforms to manage massive data sets with minimal human intervention. They were able to cut data management time in half and save 50% on storage space by utilizing its deduplication technology.
Conclusion
Data will continue to dominate as the currency required to carry out a company’s digital transformation strategy, thereby accelerating business growth. It is critical to protect data throughout the enterprise transformation journey in order for the IT department to focus on strategic initiatives, innovation, and efficiencies. Only then can business leaders make the best decisions to safeguard data and emerge as digital winners.
