Deriving impactful and valuable insights from data is the cornerstone of every business today. However, this is easier said than done.
With the heightened use of mobile devices, social media platforms and increasing adoption of advanced technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI); data is growing at an exponential rate.
Through software and services, enterprises are striving to analyse and gain insights on the data that they have across platforms, to be able to make mission-critical decisions. A Wikibon research predicts that global Big Data market revenues for software and services will increase.
David McMurdo, Veritas Technologies country director, South Africa, says that the firm is looking to address customers’ top data challenges through effective and unique solutions delivered by ‘born-in-the-cloud’ resellers.
According to McMurdo the top data challenges for customers boils down to data growth, data fragmentation, data agility, data governance and data visibility.
He says: “Data is growing at an overwhelming rate – 90% of the world’s data was created in the last two years alone. Customers are struggling to manage that volume of data growth that they are experiencing from technologies like IoT, AI and machine learning.”
McMurdo explains that this growing data no longer sits in a single location but is fragmented across different disaster recovery (DR) sites, applications and multiple clouds. Often, customers are not aware of all the different locations where their data is stored.
“The problem is further compounded when data agility comes into the picture, which is the ability to stand up services in the event of a disaster. If customers are unable to access or recover company information or corporate websites and react within the set timelines during a crisis, it could easily result in reputational and financial risks.”
According to McMurdo, companies are struggling to meet government and compliance regulations that they need to abide to when it comes to data. This is primarily because of the earlier challenges of growing and fragmented data. Ensuring customers have complete visibility on their data is perhaps the biggest challenge.
“If customers have data visibility, then they have insight to their information and can understand how fast their data is growing, how fragmented it is becoming, how compliant it is to government regulations and how agile it is during an emergency,” he explains. “Data visibility is the most important element that a company should take control of as they can then comprehend the other four elements.”
Regional partners have a huge opportunity with Veritas solutions to help customers address all their data challenges. Veritas has been focussed on data management and over recent years has become the worldwide leader in enterprise data protection and software-defined storage.
“Partners can confidently go up to customers and offer Veritas solutions to protect and optimise data, help them with meeting governance and compliance requirements, assist in data migration, which is the capability to move data from an on-premise environment into cloud and back again in the event of a disaster,” says McMurdo.
He emphasises that the overarching piece that sits over these four opportunity areas is data visibility.