Organisations need a more centralised data strategy: Commvault
Commissioned by Commvault and conducted by IDC, the study found that data silos within organisations are limiting businesses ability to make insight-based decisions and are causing increased IT costs and security concerns.
The study, The Data-Driven Organisation: Unlocking Greater Value from Data and Minimising its Associated Costs and Risks, polled 600 IT decision makers across Asia-Pacific and highlighted that disparate data management can lead to increased costs and risk.
Forty per cent of respondents stated backup, recovery, data protection and analytics strategies are still managed at a departmental level, while the top two data management challenges for Asia-Pacific include demand for easier and faster data retrieval and exponential growth and complexity of data.
In addition, 34 per cent of A/NZ IT decision makers cited security as a major issue of data silos, compared to an average of 29 per cent across Asia-Pacific, while 16 per cent of respondents stated that data silos are causing lower productivity and hindering the ability to collaborate.
Cloud remains among the top investment areas for IT. However, in A/NZ, 32 per cent said the key challenge when moving data to the Cloud is ensuring secure and real-time synchronisation of confidential and business critical data to improve efficiency. Across Asia-Pacific, this percentage stood at 21 per cent.
Commvault A/NZ area vice-president, Bryan Stibbard, said the report findings validate the necessity for speed and scale when it comes to managing business critical information and that organisations across Asia-Pacific and beyond will struggle to realise business value of key data assets without a holistic data management strategy in place.
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"CIOs around the world face a common problem: their data management silos are creating bottlenecks that result in missed opportunities and prevent organisations from achieving the full value of their data as a powerful, strategic asset.
"By taking a more integrated approach to data management, they are able to more easily leverage new and more open technology like the Cloud, while increasing information security," he said.
IDC Big Data, analytics, enterprise applications and social senior program manager, Daniel-Zoe Jimenez, said the issues of data silos are highlighted by the shift towards what IDC calls the "third platform", where businesses are increasingly focused on taking holistic views of their data in order to effectively make informed business decisions.
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He said the third platform approach presents significant opportunities for businesses to drive future growth and innovation and reinforces the risks in the departmental approach to data management.
"In the third platform era, becoming a data-driven organisation is no longer a choice, but a necessity. Making decisions based on data-driven approaches not only increases the accuracy of results, but also provides consistency in how the results are interpreted and fed back into the business.
"This necessary shift in the way data is stored, managed and analysed requires organisations to move from departmental [or siloed] approaches when managing their data assets to an integrated data-driven culture," he said.
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