What's Love Got To Do With IT?

Business leaders experience a love hate relationship with data. With no time to have their head in the clouds, CIOs need to choose the right partner to fall back on during hard times, think big and execute a better overall data management strategy in an ever-changing complex IT landscape.

Let's not forget - break ups happen. What consequences will enterprises face in the event of a "break up" or communications breakdown between departments? It is, thus, vital to embrace and implement effective data management strategies, more than ever before.

In the Month of Love, we at Commvault have pulled together our insights to draw up a list of predictions for 2017. This year, we see that business leaders will continue to make better business decisions leveraging greater insights from data to prioritise their IT investments wisely. Sweet endings do exist, after all.

Will You Marry Me? - Powerful Data Management Platforms for The Win
Increasingly, enterprises are seeking out new technologies and migrating data to cloud services. It is a business imperative for CIOs to remember that relationship with the right data management provider affects the long-term success of business' objectives.

Companies need to leverage data as a strategic asset to drive deeper insights for better business decisions. Amidst declining IT budgets and limited resources, organizations are starting to seek holistic solutions that address companies' data needs effectively. In 2017, businesses will shift away from point solution vendors and instead favour providers who can offer data management platforms: or industry goliaths will risk either undergoing a merger or being acquired.

Fight to Protect the Ones You Love - Mitigate the Nasty Effects of Ransomware
It's no secret - relationships can get messy. Corporations will face many potential threats and destructive attacks of ransomware, as cybercrime continues to rise.

Asia Pacific has been known for being a ransomware target with India, Japan and Malaysia in the top 10 countries that were affected by ransomware from January 2015 - April 2016 . Businesses must prevent and mitigate ransomware seriously and include it in their business objectives for the year by planning measures to mitigate its effects. Organizations must also be able to rapidly identify compromised content and automate its recovery to reduce downtime and financial losses.

Businesses need to make their data management systems secure yet accessible. Classifying, separating and walling off data to reduce unwarranted access of data is crucial. Love it or hate it - there's no running away from conversations on data recovery strategies at the boardroom level.

Love in the Clouds or on Ground - Keeping Data Transfer Safe, Seamless, Painless and Cost-effective
Just like a relationship, there are ebbs and flows. Data transfer needs to be seamless, to facilitate the cadence of data, moving between the cloud and on-premises.

With more than 80% of enterprise IT organizations predicted to commit to hybrid cloud architectures by 2017 , enterprises continue to embrace hybrid infrastructure models. The current pricing models from cloud service providers for moving data between on-premises and the cloud is unsustainable.

With hybrid infrastructure models in favour, current cloud storage providers need to adjust their pricing models to stay ahead of the competition - or risk losing their partners to the competition, or falling out of love.

Remain Nimble…In Love, Life, and Business - Software Defined Data Services in the Game
Software defined data services has proved that it can reduce legacy hardware expenses while also delivering the performance and scalability needed for big data, digital repository, backup and other large digital workloads.

With this evolution, enterprises can avoid vendor lock-in, increase their use of the cloud and more rapidly deploy new applications and services, delivering them with significant competitive advantages in today's digital economy.

Enterprises need to leverage the move to software defined data services to index and extract value from the data, beyond providing a less expensive storage option. Being able to manage and derive business insights from data while staying within the IT budget, enterprises can always seamlessly connect - and stay true - to their data.

Put a Ring on IT - Intelligent Data Management Is Now a Clear Necessity
Business leaders should look toward intelligent data management that allows automated access to, transfer between and the syncing of data to and from dozens of applications, databases and various other enterprise data lakes, to keep costs low and operations smoothly running.

The first step is ensuring organizations optimize their data management platform for all departments of a company to seamlessly and conveniently access data to drive valuable insights for the organization.

HR departments, for instance, do not need to go through tremendous amounts of data when hiring the right talent. After collecting, storing and backing up data, they just need to interpret data correctly to ensure they match the right candidates to the positions.

Companies may not love the hassle that goes into ensuring that their internal data management processes and policies comply with the latest regulations, but choosing the right intelligent data management platform will put you on the road towards a lovelier ending - with significant business benefits to prove for it!