May 3, 2019
Enterprise Reclaims Role as World’s Data Steward
(Jirsak/Shutterstock)
The enterprise is fast becoming the world’s data steward—again.
In the recent past, consumers were responsible for much of their own data management and storage, doing so locally through endpoints like smartphones, personal PCs, and IoT devices.
With the rise and sophistication of emerging technologies like streaming, real-time data analytics, and the proliferation of connected smart devices, the amount of data being created, captured, or replicated across the globe—otherwise known as the datasphere—is set to explode.
Consequently, this is creating a shift in the way data is stored. As the value of data continues to increase, it is crucial that enterprises embrace their role as data stewards.
By 2025 the global datasphere will swell from 33ZB of data in 2018 to 175ZB, as predicted in a recent IDC whitepaper sponsored by Seagate Technology. With this growth, the reliance on and trust of today’s cloud services only continues to grow as the need for data to be stored locally fades.
Now, consumers have grown to trust and rely on the connectivity, reliability, and convenience typical of today’s cloud services. Those expectations will only increase.
Data Steward Renaissance in the Enterprise
Not only are consumers shifting their storage needs, but businesses are also shifting their approach two-fold.
First, they are looking to centralize data management and delivery. This affects everything from extracting actionable insights through data analytics to implementing appropriate data security and privacy measures.
In this data-driven economy, it is important for organizations to make data management and innovation a priority in order to remain competitive. Perhaps that is why 33 percent of global CIOs evolved their digital endeavors to scale, up from 17 percent in the previous year, according to a recent Gartner survey.
(LeoWolfert/Shutterstock)
Second, businesses are harnessing the power of data to control their operations and to improve user experience. As companies increase the digitization of their business and drive consistent and better customer experiences, consumers are embracing these personalized real-time engagements, which they expect. This places greater demand on the core to produce the precise data consumers require, often in real-time.
Finally, cloud data centers are becoming the new enterprise data repository in the face of growing responsibility to maintain and manage the deluge of consumer and business data. In fact, IDC predicts that 49 percent of the world’s stored data will reside in public cloud environments by 2025.
Today’s digitized world is built upon artificial intelligence driving business decisions, customer engagements that are hyper-personalized, and autonomous driving infrastructure. To execute and succeed, this will require storing more data than ever before. Beginning in 2019, more data will be stored in the enterprise core than in all the world’s existing endpoints.
Re-Embracing the Data Steward Role
As data is shifting from a consumer-centric model to an enterprise-centric model, the enterprise’s role as a data steward will only continue to grow.
The enterprise must accept and embrace this responsibility to ensure the public—and potential customers— interact with data safely and efficiently. After all, enterprises are responsible for providing correct insights and excellent customer experience, even storing customers’ digital lives. While data security may be top of mind today, it will only continue to become more challenging as data collection and storage become more sophisticated.
Enterprises must ensure their data model provides secure, ubiquitous, real-time access to services and data. As consumers become more demanding of the experience in their digital lives, companies must ensure that they are providing data and services that are real-time, on-the-go, and personalized.
Companies looking to be relevant between now and 2025 will need to understand the role data plays in their organizations and how the datasphere will evolve during that period. They will need to embrace their role as data stewards, leverage the cloud, and take a holistic approach to their data.
About the author: Rags Srinivasan is Senior Director of Growth Verticals at Seagate Technology. Based in Silicon Valley, Rags has deep experience building storage systems and solutions for enterprise and cloud data centers. Rags is currently focused on defining data management for Edge, IoT and Artificial Intelligence.
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