Data is the new global currency

Philips Ranjit

We live in a world where ‘pace’ defines business success. Today’s dynamic and rapidly changing business environment calls for agile and innovative technologies to help businesses deliver consistently at a quick rate.

Organizations today are generating massive amounts of data, swiftly on multiple devices and platforms. While the need to quickly adopt storage technologies is imperative, complexities of cloud deployments can get overlooked. Many organizations that charge into cloud deployment haphazardly quickly find themselves mired in costly innovation- like vendor lock-in and disparate cloud architectures. Worse still, they place their mission-critical data at risk or out of reach. Some lose it entirely.

With a basic understanding and some thoughtful planning, challenges can be completely avoided. The cloud, is quite simple. It is fundamentally reshaping business intelligence, removing blocks to innovation, and transforming data’s role into success.

First, the simple:

When organizations deploy cloud solutions, it means all the information will be stored outside the organization’s physical infrastructure, often in space rented on-demand from large scale utilities like Google, Amazon or Azure.

Having data in the cloud means it is globally accessible and flexible, with extreme ease of access and scalability. Earlier, organizations would have to buy, build, house and maintain a data center. It was a labor-intensive, painstaking and costly endeavor. Today, a rental contract with a cloud service provider can be signed quickly, offering instant global reach and larger organizations are realizing the advantages of migrating their data into the cloud – invariably, into a hybrid cloud architecture that combines on- and off-premise deployment.

This small but critical distinction – the ability to seamlessly house and access data between multiple cloud resources in a hybrid configuration – has had enormous consequences. It has transformed data into a new kind of global currency and immeasurably increased the importance of IT to business success today. The ability to instantly access mission-critical data creates both opportunity and risk in a cloud deployment. How efficiently and effectively an organization is able to recognize, analyze and derive intelligence from data is now more critical than ever before. An organization’s ability to restrict access and protect that data is equally important.

Why? Data is extremely valuable because it is a fundamental driver of business success and competitive advantage. Cloud has moved far beyond “storage,” with all its associations of a dusty warehouse filled with old files. Technology innovation has evolved, data is a valuable corporate asset that needs to be retrieved efficiently and guarded carefully.

Simply put, data is now money.

Data most closely resembles money, not computerized banking or split-second financial industry trading. It is more like cash, palpable– heavy, cumbersome and hard to move. Large data transfers can take days, even weeks. Now more than ever, data needs to be carefully managed across different “boundaries”, without losing control. Data is particularly valuable and personal, but it is also extremely cumbersome.

Vendors are evaluated on various parameters, like the country they operate in, corporate history, security protocols and even their proximity to customers. This is the essence of what is now called “data stewardship.” One can offload the infrastructure, the applications, the services, but can never offload or outsource “control” and responsibilities of important data.

Cloud is essentially a simple concept, take the data behind the organizations firewall to a place where it is more accessible, flexible and scalable. Smart, conscientious cloud deployment can drive greater value to a company’s information, while tapping the incredible power of innovation to drive real impact.

The sooner organizations realize the importance of cloud and its implication, the more effectively they will be able to use the power of information to their advantage. As the concept of cloud becomes clearer to organizations, its complications will be further simplified and its incredible benefits of storing data will be realized.

The author is the director - Cloud, NetApp India & SAARC