Many companies cannot manage data volumes sufficiently
A study shows that data is becoming one of the most business-critical areas for all companies. However, the study also reveals that companies are struggling to cope with the growing volume of data and therefore addresses the key challenges and opportunities for data management.
Digital Realty, a global provider of cloud technology and carrier-neutral data center, colocation and interconnection solutions, has released the results of its first Global Data Insights Survey. More than 7,000 executives from 23 countries and nine industries participated in the survey. "Recently, we observed a new megatrend on our platform: the explosion of enterprise data worldwide. As all industries need to create, consume, analyze, store and share ever-larger volumes of data, they are becoming information industries," said Dave McCrory, VP of Growth and Global Head of Insights and Analytics at Digital Realty, explaining the motivation for conducting the survey. Earlier on this topic, the company conducted a similar investigation performed.
Data becomes the business agenda
The survey confirms that data is increasingly important and that business strategy and results depend on data-driven insights. Data
are ubiquitous. The volume of data is multiplying at all business locations. As a result, information must be aggregated efficiently. 47 % of the IT executives surveyed said they hold data decentrally, while 52 % hold it centrally. This highlights how different the strategies for organizing and managing data are across industries. This can directly impact an organization's ability to create value and results with data, and confirms that aggregation must be prioritized.
IT executives said that data-driven insights are essential for improving the customer experience (50 %) for data infrastructure location strategy (37 %) for developing new digital products (35 %) and for driving business growth (28 %). In addition, a key finding of the survey is that large enterprises around the world are not investing enough in the tools and infrastructure needed to handle the growing volume of data.
Managing growing data volumes: Many obstacles
53 % of global respondents cited lack of sufficient investment in data systems or infrastructure as the main barrier to their company gaining data-driven insights. Similarly, 50 % of respondents cited a lack of sufficient investment in relevant analytics tools. To manage the rapid growth of data, companies need to ensure that data does not become siloed and that they are able to extract insights from it in a time-efficient and prescriptive manner. And this requires investment.
The study shows where everywhere there seems to be a hitch: regulations, data protection rules, reluctant customers and a lack of investment in data systems are hindering the data-driven business agenda. 35 % of IT executives cited data privacy and regulations as one of the main barriers to data-driven insights. The majority also recognized the need to maintain local copies of data and applications to serve a growing number of end users and networked devices, and to ensure secure and compliant business operations
Build employee capabilities to derive value from data
The survey also shows that 65 of IT executives from some of the world's largest companies believe they need to invest in their teams' data skills to remain competitive and derive value from data. The importance of team development as a business-critical step surpassed investment in AI (59 %) when asked what was most important for companies to do in the next two years to gain more data-driven insights. When asked the same question, 61 % of companies with more than US$1 billion in revenue said they will prioritize executive education on the impact of data silos.
Data First Strategies Make the Race
Leading organizations are realizing the benefits of data integration, security and controls in so-called multi-tenant data centers, where new intelligent workflows are being unlocked in centers of data exchange between employees, customers, partners and ecosystems. 82 % of IT executives agree that they need a
need global data center providers capable of offering global coverage, capacity and direct connectivity in major metropolitan areas on a single data center platform. In addition, 75 % of enterprises with more than US$1 billion in revenue have a formal data strategy, compared to 63 % of general global enterprises. This suggests that larger companies are a bit further ahead in terms of data processing. This likely gives them an advantage over smaller competitors.
Source: Digital Realty
