Invest in data management now and reap the rewards sooner than later

By Krishna Subramanian, COO at Komprise

Every business today relies on data more than ever before, which can only be a good thing as data is becoming an increasingly important way to generate revenue. With fierce competition between businesses across every industry, finding methods to manage data effectively can mean the difference between matching competitors and beating them. Better managed data equals happier customers – so what solutions are needed to achieve this? As the amount of unstructured data increases, the ease with which employees can manage this data is decreasing. Therefore, data management tools can be the answer, providing the ability to quickly and efficiently sort through data, analyse it, and help IT teams determine where to store it.

Krishna Subramanian, COO at Komprise

However,businesses recognise that efficiently managing and extracting value from their unstructured data is vital for increasing revenues and visibility, as well as meeting customers’ needs, thereby enabling IT to provide a high-quality service without exhausting expensive and unnecessary resources. Introducing a data management solution that can help govern this data enables businesses to save money in some key areas, making it a smart move for all.

Seeing is believing

Having better visibility and analytics provided through a data management solution can be a key way for businesses to increase margins and revenues. As unstructured data foot prints are growing exponentially, the visibility into how data is being used is important to keep costs low while managing ever larger volumes of data. The majority of the cost of data is not in its storage but in its active management – businesses typically spend four times more than the storage cost to actively backup and manage data. Given that most of their data becomes inactive and cold within months, this cost overhead becomes overwhelming as data grows. So, finding the cold data across storage is important for IT to efficiently transfer it from actively managed storage to archive environments. And, giving an easily searchable view across all data is vital for employees to find the right data they need to gain fundamental business insights rather than spending time trawling through millions and millions of files on various storage and cloud environments.

A management solution that can work behind the scenes, analysing and keeping on top of all the new data that is consistently being created, allows a business to make effective decisions about how to manage data and data growth efficiently to keep storage and backup costs in check. Analysing and managing all data in one easy-to-use solution presents IT teams with the information required to determine where savings can be made through their ability to put both their employees and their archive storage to good use.

Freeing up employees

When it comes to storage, managing quotas, backup windows and migrating data as storage fills up are the time-consuming tasks that can prevent experts from focusing their efforts where they are needed more. While structured data is usually fairly manageable, unstructured data can get very large very quickly, making it much harder to understand and efficiently manage. Therefore, having a data management solution that can accurately sift through huge amounts of data can make the process of identifying cold data much simpler and quicker. The visibility provided can also assist businesses with observing employees’ use of data, anticipate any future storage needs and understand what could be offloaded to archive storage.

With more effective data analysis solutions, staff are able to focus on tasks within the business that rely specifically on the expertise of a human employee as opposed to being completed by a machine, and so overall the labour costs come down – with fewer employees required to handle the routined at a monitoring, resources can be distributed more efficiently across the company to better meet business objectives.

Save with smarter storage

Being able to streamline data is crucial for businesses to make a positive impact on their data storage, and data management solutions can help to achieve this. Considering the volume of data being generated is increasing faster than ever before, having sufficient storage and efficient data protection to cope with this growth is essential. The dilemma that most businesses face is understanding the hot data that needs to be kept active and accessible, and the cold data that can be moved to archive storage because it is being kept as a record but isn’t in use.

But IT teams shouldn’t just move all of their older data files into storage, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud. Using data management tools can help to determine which files can be deleted, which in turn reduces the overall amount of data being stored at all. Less data in storage means less payments at the end of the month, enabling business leaders to put this money saved towards more important areas of the company, that can ultimately provide better services for customers.

The growth of unstructured data is on the rise, as data from videos and IoT devices for example become ever more common. Because of this, having an effective data management solution in place is a necessary expense for a business to ultimately increase revenue. With data being sorted and stored more efficiently, employees are able to easily find the data they need quickly, increasing the overall efficiency of the business and delivering a better customer experience.

Wanda Rich

Editor-in-Chief since 2011.