The role cloud data management and resiliency have in driving improvements for organisational productivity

In my first blog I would like to highlight how transforming your data management can help enable competitive advantage in the digital economy. As organisations continue to adapt to changing global realities, enterprise transformation and multi-cloud roadmaps have accelerated to deal with the urgency of enabling remote working and digital processes.

Data the great productivity enabler

Digital transformation can have a huge impact on an organisation’s productivity. The benefits go far beyond simply replacing physical interactions, such as face-to-face meetings and paper-based processes, with digital channels and formats. It is about capturing new forms of value and economic output through data.

In the geographical region I manage at Veritas, I have seen that placing data at the heart of workflows and decision-making can help organisations to produce better outcomes at both a business user and customer level. Such an approach can produce exceptional productivity improvements in the following areas:

• Efficiency – Organisations can enable more streamlined processes and data sharing across functions, leading to continuous improvement loops and a massive reduction in wasted resources. For example, a license issuing authority may hold millions of driver and vehicle records, which need to be renewed at varying intervals. Integrating cloud into how that data is stored, processed, and actioned can create smoother, more streamlined services that benefit both the government and the licensee, saving thousands of hours in application and processing times and increasing the economic output of employees in general.

• Personalisation – Across sectors, organisations are seeking to become more customer-centric in how they interact with their service users. By leveraging customer data, supported by an ever-growing network of connected devices, they can take a more targeted approach to how valuable information from different data sources are consolidated and fed into each customer’s experience lifecycle. For example, health authorities are increasingly seeking to use artificial intelligence for patient interventions that proactively identify at-risk social groups and personalise strategies around medicine provision. This approach better caters to the patients’ unique needs, as well as supporting society-wide benefits, such as creating a healthier population, longer working lives and less sick leave.

• Collaboration – Given requirements around distancing that emerged during the pandemic, organisations have sought ways to enable employees in various locations to collaborate more effectively through software. This gave greater urgency to the pre-existing trend towards remote working that had been gaining momentum. By enabling data to be shared easily and securely across devices and locations, such as in the use of business communication platforms and cloud-based collaboration tools, employees in a variety of roles can easily co-create and problem-solve across countries.

These advancements in how services are delivered at both the customer and employee levels are underpinned by reliable and highly available data, fuelling exponential improvements in global output and productivity we will see over the coming years.

Solving organisational data management risks

In parallel to improving the quality and availability of data, organisations are also placing greater focus on how that data is stored securely across an increasingly complex hybrid environment. To remain operational following the outbreak of COVID-19, IT teams worldwide had to relax the typical controls aimed at mitigating digital risks. Strategies around resiliency and data security therefore took a back seat to accelerate cloud adoption, replacing a focus on establishing company-wide cloud standards and defending against new ransomware attack vectors.

To optimise the benefits of enhanced employee productivity and improved customer experiences, organisations need to address the vulnerability lag as a matter of urgency. This involves gaining greater control over the organisation’s multi-cloud footprint. To address this lag, organisational leaders need to confidently answer the following questions:

• Visibility. Where are your applications and workloads running? Which clouds are you using? Do you have any ‘dark data’ that is failing to generate value?

• Redundancy. Do you have plans for backups and disaster recovery and have they been tested? If a public cloud platform experiences downtime, how will your services be impacted? Do you have protection against ransomware?

• Compliance. Are you able to evidence regulatory compliance quickly and easily? Do you have policies in place for data sovereignty?

• Cost. Are your cloud usage costs optimised? How easily can you migrate data between clouds? Are you aware of your costs for migration and data ingress or egress?

• Consistency. Are your multi-cloud data management practices consistent with those in your own data centre? Does your organisation know what services, guarantees and Service Level Agreements your cloud platform provides, and which responsibilities belong to your organisation?

These questions are all part of forming a coherent hybrid cloud data management strategy and can help you to re-calibrate your digital transformation journey. By taking steps to ensure your cloud data possesses these features, you can create a more productive, sustainable, and secure data footprint for your organisation. The efficiency improvements enabled by enhanced data management yields competitive advantage for organisations at a national and global level, driving a secure and productive future for the digital economy.

To find out how Veritas can help you to reduce cloud data complexity and address your vulnerability lag, read more here.