No matter how macroeconomic forces shape the world, one thing remains certain: the amount of data being created continues to grow. Data and how it is managed can help organisations act with agility and ensure they’re better able to meet changing business requirements. It’s almost impossible to innovate at speed without the right data foundation in place.
Over the last two years, owing to digitalisation due to the pandemic, data in India is being generated at astronomical rates and volumes. It’s estimated that 41.6 billion connected devices generate 79.4 zettabytes (ZB) of data in the year 2025, according to an IDC Forecast. Organisations are adopting collaborative development operations (DevOps), utilising cloud-based software offerings, and increasingly leveraging AI and data analytics. These technologies are optimising operations and personalising employee and customer experience. Yet as the volumes grow larger, these technologies are also forcing organisations to rethink their data foundations and how they can optimise them to drive value.
Nutanix recently commissioned a series of IDC InfoBriefs into the components of data-driven innovation and the role of the c-suite in helping shape this next wave of data-fuelled digital transformation. The analyst firm found that the c-suite is heavily committed to investing in data programs, with 70 percent of CEOs having articulated the need for their organisations to be more data-driven.
Connecting the dots across the enterprise is imperative to meet data-driven ambitions, and technology leaders have a crucial role to play in this equation. However, they also face challenges bringing together data from across a sprawling array of sites, and extracting value from it without hoards of technical experts.
Creating an aggregated and unified data layer
Today in India, data is fragmented across core, edge, cloud, and secondary sites, impacting latency, and increasing vulnerabilities and complexities. Many organisations are struggling with data volumes, variety and quality, latency, information governance, growing data management and egress costs, as well as ageing database sprawl. That’s in addition to the ongoing challenge of warding off ransomware attacks, which IDC cites as the most challenging area of data protection
Old IT platforms are ill equipped to manage all these components. Enterprises need an intelligent, aggregated and unified data layer that understands the threats and challenges. It should also offer modern security and resilience technologies within its foundational layer. Deploying this data foundation across a hybrid multicloud environment is key to enabling company-wide, data-driven innovation.
According to IDC, hybrid multicloud “continues to emerge as a “best of both” worlds deployment strategy”ii. Organisations are now realising that if they want to build tomorrow’s intelligent organisation today, they will need multiple clouds to support specific functions and distributed clouds for edge processing with hyperscale functions. Therefore, the data foundation must have hybrid multicloud interoperability – unifying workloads and allowing data to be integrated, analysed, and acted on regardless of where it’s stored.
Leveraging automation to extract value
In unifying data and drawing insights from across the organisation within one foundational layer, organisations are also being forced to rethink how they manage and optimise their structured and unstructured data. In years gone by, databases often took weeks to provision, and database administrations were stuck waiting on complex storage provisioning which required multiple disk groups for different types of data, as well as intricate cloning and data refresh processes.
With hybrid multicloud architecture, on-premise enterprise database deployments can be managed in the same manner as cloud environments. Automation and one-click, multi-database management features and governance across multiple public cloud services and on-premises data centres help streamline the time, cost and complexities of managing structured data. At Nutanix, for example, we offer a database-as-a-service solution that provides a single dashboard with on-click simplicity and automation for all major databases, no matter where they reside – which helps free up IT teams to deliver more transformative technology outcomes across the organisation.
Having the right data foundation is also essential for managing unstructured data. To run the analytical tools required, like Splunk or Tableau, the underlying infrastructure must be able to scale and support high performance functionality. Again, a hybrid multicloud architecture makes this achievable.
In conclusion, data is essential to making smart business decisions. And it comes from a variety of sources, including smart phones, Internet of Things (IoT) gadgets, driverless vehicles, industrial sensors, medical wearables, video surveillance, and other cutting-edge technology. The ability to retain, access, and derive useful insights from that data may be what distinguishes your company from the competition. Storing all this data is a major (but necessary) step in that direction.
(The author is Mr. Faiz Shakir, Managing Director – Sales, Nutanix India & SAARC, Nutanix and the views expressed in this article are his own)
