Many companies cannot manage data volumes sufficiently

Digital Realty, a global provider of cloud technology and carrier-neutral data center, colocation and interconnection solutions, has released the results of its first Global Data Insights Survey. More than 7,000 executives from 23 countries and nine industries participated in the survey. "Recently, we observed a new megatrend on our platform: the explosion of enterprise data worldwide. As all industries need to create, consume, analyze, store and share ever-larger volumes of data, they are becoming information industries," said Dave McCrory, VP of Growth and Global Head of Insights and Analytics at Digital Realty, explaining the motivation for conducting the survey. Earlier on this topic, the company conducted a similar investigation performed.

Data becomes the business agenda

The survey confirms that data is becoming increasingly important and that companies' strategy and results depend on data-driven insights. Data is omnipresent. The volume of data is multiplying at all business locations. As a result, information needs to be aggregated efficiently. 47 % of the IT executives surveyed stated that they keep data decentralized, while 52 % keep it centralized. This highlights how different the strategies for organizing and managing data are across industries. This can have a direct impact on a company's ability to create value and results with data and confirms that aggregation needs to be prioritized. IT leaders indicated that data-driven insights are essential for improving the customer experience (50 %) for data infrastructure location strategy (37 %) for developing new digital products (35 %) and for driving business growth (28 %). Another key finding of the survey is that large companies around the world are not investing enough in the tools and infrastructure needed to cope with the growing volume of data.

Managing growing data volumes: Many obstacles

53 % of respondents worldwide cited the lack of sufficient investment in data systems or infrastructure as the main obstacle for their company to gain data-driven insights. Similarly, 50 % of respondents stated that there is a lack of sufficient investment in relevant analytics tools. To cope with rapid data growth, companies need to ensure that data does not become siloed and that they are able to extract insights from it in a time-efficient and compliant manner. And this requires investment. The study shows where there seems to be a problem: regulations, data protection provisions, reluctant customers and a lack of investment in data systems are hindering the data-driven business agenda. 35 % of IT leaders cited data protection and regulation as one of the main barriers to data-driven insights. The majority also recognized the need to maintain local copies of data and applications to serve a growing number of end users and networked devices and to ensure secure and compliant business operations

Build employee capabilities to derive value from data

The survey also shows that 65 of IT executives from some of the world's largest companies believe they need to invest in their teams' data skills to remain competitive and derive value from data. The importance of team development as a business-critical step surpassed investment in AI (59 %) when asked what was most important for companies to do in the next two years to gain more data-driven insights. When asked the same question, 61 % of companies with more than US$1 billion in revenue said they will prioritize executive education on the impact of data silos.

Data First Strategies Make the Race

Leading companies are recognizing the benefits of data integration, security and controls in multi-tenant data centers, where new intelligent workflows are being unlocked in hubs of data exchange between employees, customers, partners and ecosystems. 82 % of IT leaders agree that they need a global data center provider that global data center provider capable of offering global coverage, capacity and direct connectivity in major metropolitan areas on a single data center platform. In addition, 75 % of companies with revenues of more than US$1 billion have a formal data strategy, compared to 63 % of general global companies. This suggests that larger companies are slightly more advanced when it comes to data. This likely gives them an advantage over smaller competitors. Source: Digital Realty

This article originally appeared on m-q.ch - https://www.m-q.ch/de/viele-unternehmen-koennen-datenvolumen-nicht-genuegend-bewaeltigen/