Is Data Access More Important than Data?

[Kate_Lewis]

There is no denying that data is invaluable. It underpins everything we do, especially being in the digital age. If anything happens to any of our servers we use backup copies to restore lost data. We use data to make decisions; some simple and others life changing e.g. using data to develop cures for illnesses. We use data to bring to market new applications. We use data to enable us to move forward.

Some businesses are literally built on data – e.g. Facebook (worth $328 billion) and Twitter (worth $10 billion). Other businesses can easily attribute how data is adding to their bottom line. For example - a large supermarket operator records what customers buy at its more than 2,600 stores and also tracks the purchasing history of its roughly 55 million loyalty-card members. It sifts this data for trends and then, through a joint venture, sells the information to the vendors who stock its shelves with goods ranging from cereals to sodas. Consumer-products makers are willing to pay for those insights because it allows them to tailor their products and marketing to consumer preferences. It’s estimated that the supermarket rakes in $100 million a year from data sales alone.

Data permeates everything we do – that’s why we often hear data referred to as the lifeblood of businesses and organizations. However, it’s true that not all data is equal, but it’s also true that data is so critical we couldn’t live without it. That’s why numerous experts have put a dollar value on data. According to Leonard Nakamura, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, corporate holdings of data and other “intangible assets,” such as patents, trademarks and copyrights, could be worth more than $8 trillion.

Organizations are investing millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars to create, store, maintain and protect data. So if we combine the value of data, the necessity of data, and the amount of money being spent on data, it’s easy to see how important data is, but if you can’t access that data within an appropriate timeframe based on the need, then organizations are spending a lot of money without gaining any real value. After all, what do we really gain when data is just sitting on storage? Nothing. The real value of data is derived when it’s used. Furthermore, the speed and efficiency in accessing and obtaining that data is even more important as it significantly impacts the value of the data.

In fact, according to Gartner, business success is now tied to IT efficiency and flexibility — how efficiently the data is managed and how quickly businesses can respond to change. Fast data access is transformational. Being able to make timely decisions can generate millions or save a business from losing millions just as we saw in the supermarket case above. Being able to accelerate application release cycles by removing the data access bottleneck can enable businesses to gain a competitive edge. Accessing data faster increases productivity and enables the business to respond to business requirements faster than before which translates into high profits. There are so many transformational outcomes that can be derived from improving data access not just to the IT organization, but also to the business as a whole.

Therefore, it's absolutely essential for IT professionals to lead the way toward better data management strategies that will enable operational agility and business efficiency. And that’s exactly what Velocity, the new entrant into the Data Virtualization / Copy Data Management market, is going to provide to your organization – an entirely new and better way to manage your data. If you haven’t heard of Veritas Velocity, Velocity enables organizations to quickly and easily provide authorized users access to copies of production data and greatly improve the speed, control, and predictability of any workflow or process dependent on those copies such as test and development.

If you would you like to learn more, please email team.velocity@veritas.com.