Orchestrating data has become a major challenge for the fledgling role of the Chief Data Officer (CDO). After all, the typical enterprise has data spread throughout numerous and different storage solutions, driven by line of business applications and other business-centric processes. None the less, CDOs need to get a handle on those data silos if they hope to establish data ownership and bring additional value to business operations.
One of the biggest drivers behind transforming data comes in the form of analytics, where CDOs enable teams to mine data and deliver relevant insights, which ultimately improve business operations. Yet, data silos have become one of the biggest impediments to establishing context around the data and identifying critical business trends.
“Storage diversity across flash, cloud, hyper-converged, and traditional systems give enterprises the right storage tool for any job, but until now, data has been trapped in the typical storage silos, forcing IT to overprovision and limit the value of billions of dollars of enterprises storage investments,” said Lance Smith, Primary Data CEO. “DataSphere automatically orchestrates the right data to the right place at the right time according to IT-defined objectives, without business or application disruption. This industry first can easily cut customers’ storage costs in half by finally aligning data to the ideal storage system according to business needs.” Smith seems to be on to something, reducing data costs and bringing added context to data has become one of the major jobs of the CDO, in addition to the orchestration of data.
According to Smith, “DataSphere orchestrates data across file, block and object protocols, something no other product has done to date. Smith went on to say “Unifying data across different storage types overcomes storage silos and aligns resources with changing business needs.”
While that may sound like marketing talk, the critical acknowledgment here comes from the fact that digital transformation is powered by the ability to unify systems, especially when those systems deal with different types of data. So in essence, removing silos and granting universal access to data resources has become a critical prerequisite to achieving digital transformation, especially once data analytics enter the picture.
For businesses, there are several inherent advantages to eliminating the complexities around silos. For example, having a focused, singular point of data orchestration and management brings efficiency your operations, where the CDO actually manages data as an entity, instead of as several interrelated pieces, each with its own unique aspects. This approach also makes management much easier for the admins who oversee all these systems and applications throughout the organization.
Also, a unified approach invigorates analytics, where data scientists are now able to work with structured and unstructured data in a more orchestrated fashion, and are able to capture the needed relevance from multiple data feeds.
What’s more, data protection becomes a more attainable concept. If those managing the data knows what data is where, it becomes much simpler to capture what is important to preserve, and eliminate the tendency to overlook disassociated data elements.
All things considered, DataSphere is on the right path when it comes to maximizing the value of data and fueling digital transformation.
