News & Analysis

Is the Outlook towards Data Protection Shifting?

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By: Harish Venkat – Vice President, Global leader of GTM strategies for Backup Exec & SaaS Products and Sales Enablement

Data is the new oil. Once upon a time, those with oil reserves controlled the cash but today it is those sitting on massive amounts of data who are in a position to leverage it for business gains. In a fast-growing connected world, the importance of data is such that Boardroom discussions often revolve around how to enhance it, analyze it and most importantly on how to secure it.

At present, technological adoption is riding higher across the globe and what ought to be remembered in the entire narrative is that data will remain the key. Name any cutting-edge technology, like artificial intelligence, IoT, the fact remains that data is the backbone. At the end, it is this data that is processed by the technologies to provide the outcome.

In the recently conducted roundtable conference by Veritas in Bengaluru, we identified certain technological trends and the shifts in the concept of data protection. Veritas is a global leader in enterprise data protection and software-defined storage.

Harish Venkat, Vice President, Global Sales Enablement, Veritas, kickstarted the debate with a few interesting trends that are seen in the world of technology.

  • Business Disruption: The new age technologies are disrupting the business faster than ever. Between 2001-2014, 52% of Fortune 500 companies faced disruption and these figures are only going to increase in the following years. He said, “If the old companies do not adapt to technological change, they are most likely to be engulfed by the new companies and new business models which are more adaptive to the new age technologies.”
  • Forces Fueling Disruption: According to Veritas, the business disruption which we talked about above, can be attributed to five key forces. These include: Mobility growth, cloud growth, social media, AI-ML and IoT.
  • Current IT Spends: Veritas revealed that at present, the organizations do not have a proper IT expenditure which is the root of all the technological sufferings they undergo. According to the statistics shared by them, 67% of the expenditure is dedicated to running the business, 25% on working on the business opportunity and only 8% is spent on innovation, an area which required the major attention and budget at the moment.
  • Business expectations from the IT: If we want to keep up with the disruption, then IT is one core element which needs to be changed. It needs to become more agile and fast, more customer focused which could be done with better analytics and analytics driven experiences and strategy and lastly, it needs to become cost efficient as businesses always want more in the lesser cost.

As we talk about so much of innovation and disruption, data remains central and plays an important role. However, what’s more crucial here is the protection of this data. We have probably touched the horizon where data mining and data analysis have taken off, but we are still far away from keeping the same data secured.

While we understand that the onus of data protection falls on the CSOs, CTOs and CIOs, Veritas sees a changing trend in the C-level conversations. They believe that at this time the industry has reached a point where almost all the organizations understand the important of data protection.

“We are no longer needed to sell them the importance of data protection”, says Balaji Rao, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Veritas.

“The way a Lamborghini owner insures his car, a Maruti 800 owner does the same. Only difference comes in the scale and expenditure but none of them give a second thought to the idea of insuring their cars. Similarly, be it a Fortune 500 company or an SMB, both have started taking the data protection on a serious note, says Harish Venkat, giving the story a simple twist.

The shift in C-suite conversation can be understood from the fact that the importance is no more contested but what’s contested is who can deliver faster restoration if they are attacked and on what scale. It is here that data protection companies today are to sharpen themselves to tackle to data protection problem better.

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