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[1].
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[2],
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!