The Data Landscape: Dealing with the Data Deluge

Organizations in all industries and geographies are dealing with a torrent of new data from the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI), social media, and other unstructured data sources. Analysts estimate that the size of the digital universe will double every two years1 at least, with many organizations reporting substantial information growth of this kind year over year.

Data will continue to grow in both volume and importance as organizations develop more ways to monetize, analyze, and use their data to create better customer experiences. If your database and the infrastructure behind it aren’t ready to store and process this huge data opportunity, you risk falling behind the competition.

Unfortunately, many organizations lack the resources they need to deal with the data deluge, or believe costs will increase, holding back data managers from expanding their database assets to keep up with growth2.

Continuing struggles with security.

With lots of new data comes the potential for new attack vectors that organizations will need to protect against. In fact, nearly one-third of respondents to an IOUG survey expected to experience some kind of data breach in 2017.

Security has, of course, always been a prime concern for database administrators and IT leaders. But with recent high-profile breaches across the likes of Yahoo, Sony, and Equifax—as well as the pains of the WannaCry epidemic still felt by many—it’s clear that security will continue to be a high priority.

Data protection regulations such as GDPR mean that IT managers and database administrators of any global organization need far better visibility into the security of data across the enterprise. If you can’t get that visibility, the fines for noncompliance can be severe. That means you need to be able to get a complete view of data across your data center, and across any cloud services you use.

Under GDPR, you also need to be able to keep track of all copies of personal data throughout your enterprise, to protect them against inappropriate access, and be able to correct or delete them if a customer asks you to do so. If you don't have consistent ways of managing, processing, and protecting personal data across your enterprise, this may be nearly impossible to do.

Developing your data strategy.

To thrive in the new era of data, you need to develop a modern approach to it. Unfortunately, many organizations are well behind the curve when it comes to their data strategy. Harvard Business Review found that less than half of the average organization’s structured data is used to make decisions—and less than 1 percent of unstructured data is used or analyzed at all. By not leveraging their data, enterprises run the risk of falling behind competitively.

For many, implementing a modern data strategy will be as simple as hiring a chief data officer and formalizing a data management function. This is an important step, but it must be accompanied by a full data strategy that sets out how your organization will organize, govern, analyze, protect, and deploy data over the long term.

You also need to consider the various trade-offs in how you choose to use data in your organization. Do you use it for defensive business initiatives like ensuring compliance and fraud/theft detection? Do you use your data offensively to improve sales and marketing activities with customer insight?

Only by considering your data strategy carefully—and ensuring your infrastructure and IT processes are ready for it—can you meet the data deluge head-on, and ensure you are ready to make the most of the modern data opportunity.

  1. 1 Inside Big Data.(2017). The Exponential Growth of Data. Inside Big Data
    https://insidebigdata.com/2017/02/16/the-exponential-growth-of-data/.
  2. 2 IOUG.(2016). The Empowered Database: 2016 Enterprise Platform Decisions Survey. IOUG
    http://www.ioug.org/d/do/6896.

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