Your Digital Success Depends on How You Store Your Data
- By Joseph Chan, Veeam
- July 29, 2019
A few weeks earlier, several forums, websites, social media platforms, and instant messaging apps experienced downtime. Not only did this affect billions of users’ social lives, but SMEs that rely heavily on social media also fell as victims of downtime as they failed to publish posts or communicate with potential buyers.
These social media platforms that we use every day, together with a lot of organizations that have embarked on their digital transformation journey, run into a common problem - recovery downtime. The 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management Report surveyed more than 1,500 senior business and IT leaders and found that 73% of respondents report an 'Availability Gap' (the gap between users demand for uninterrupted access to data and services and what businesses and IT can deliver). This 'Availability Gap' costs organizations over USD 20 million each year in lost revenues and productivity, and also affects customer confidence.
However, the report also highlights that organizations are already looking to minimize downtime and maximize what digital transformation can do for them by employing cloud data management and leveraging the power of data. They can use cloud data management to manage their data and ensure that their data learns to respond instantly and appropriately to what happens anywhere across the enterprise infrastructure.
We found that the most successful businesses have four common core attributes that drive success. Keeping APAC organizations in mind, here is my take on these four attributes:
Cloud
The use of cloud data management provides a key advantage over on-premise data storage and management: physical accessibility. Successful organizations recognize the advantages of a cloud-based approach, which is more reliable, flexible, secure, and incurs lower costs. As multicloud becomes the norm for most enterprises across the Asia Pacific, it is essential for organizations to have future-proof cloud plans to reap the benefits of delivering intelligent data management properly.
Culture
Organizations need to create a culture that is adaptable and receptive to new technologies for their employees to evolve with the organization. Culture and talent management has become critical to organizations, as a company’s culture may enable cloud data management, or may also end up impeding the progress of a company.
Confidence
As Asia Pacific organizations are increasingly implementing the cloud, they must create a sense of confidence in the business's digital capabilities, built on a strong data foundation. Employees need to be confident in managing changing environments caused by the adoption of new technologies to properly reap the rewards of successful cloud data management.
Capabilities
Successful organizations know that to enhance their capabilities, they need to start upskilling their staff. In the cloud data management report, nine in ten respondents agree that upskilling staff in digital skills will be vital to their organization’s success in the next three years. However, we have seen that time and budget are the limiting factors in many organizations. The SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2019 found that close to 70% of tech professionals in Hong Kong lack time or budget to train. Hence, organizations need to acknowledge these limitations and create time and space for their staff to upskill.
As we move into the age of AI, Big Data, and IoT, it is becoming increasingly important for organizations to have access to their data at all times. With these four core attributes and cloud data management, organizations will be able to ensure that they can leverage these new technologies to achieve success as an intelligent business.
Joseph Chan, regional director for Hong Kong, Macau & Taiwan, Veeam, contributed this article.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of CDOTrends.