By Sheena Chin, Managing Director of ASEAN, Cohesity
In 2020, IDC predicted that the total Asia Pacific spending for public cloud will reach US $34.51 billion, increasing from US$ 25.98 billion in 2019. Moving forward, it is predicted that over a quarter of new workloads deployed on public clouds. What we see in this post-pandemic world is a real revolution in the data management sector driven by cloud technologies.
One of the biggest recent moves by many vendors that initially catered for on-premises data has been the introduction of cloud data management. With the rise of storing a company’s data on an offsite server managed by a hyper scaler like AWS, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform, or a local specialist in cloud data hosting.
Cloud data management provides an automated backup strategy, professional support, and ease of access from any location. Multi-cloud IT strategies are here to stay, and data management vendors are moving to support the latest models of IT space.
Internal and external forces converge to drive value
Organisations now face – quite rightly – increasingly stringent requirements on data protection and compliance. They must meet these requirements to the highest standards. Threats from malware, hackers and ransomware are not going away any time soon, and organisations need to be sure their backups can withstand the onslaught. Therefore, in extreme need of disaster recovery, restores must be reliable and be called upon at any time. Businesses need to understand and realise the true value that data can bring. Organisations who are able to do so find themselves no longer spending on unnecessary purchases, and have more bandwidth to focus on more critical issues on hand.
The pandemic has also forced IT teams to find new ways to support remote workers. In the beginning, many of them struggled with managing data remotely, and this made businesses realise the need of stronger compliance regulations. The scramble may be difficult for organisations that struggle to prioritise data management early on.
In Singapore, the Public Sector (Governance) Act 2018 and Personal Data Protection Act 2012 legal data management frameworks were created to address differing expectations for the public and private sectors. Businesses need to understand the different challenges that they are currently facing and observe the way different regulations can act as guidelines for better data management.
Moving forward, data protection is evolving into data management. The scramble may be difficult for organisations that struggle to prioritise data management early on. IDC predicted that through 2023, half of enterprises’ hybrid workforce and business automation efforts will be delayed or will fail outright due to underinvestment in building IT/Sec/DevOps teams with the right tools or skills. Innovation in the data management sector can act as a motivating factor as businesses will try their best to keep up with the latest innovations that can help bring businesses to new levels. This also allows customers to make the right investments and scale whenever the business is ready.
Managing the data mountain one file at a time
All data sits within the context of organisations generating more data than ever before. In the case of the more far-sighted, organisations can use machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to mine that data for information and insights. Moving forward, this will help IT teams to refine their focus and deliver what their customers really want.
For AI and ML to reach their full potential, data needs to be stored collectively rather than siloed in various ‘cubbyholes’ where its value can’t be extracted. Therefore, organisations need to consider taking a Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) approach to remedy this challenge. Data management is a holistic process where data recovery, compliance and the extraction of business intelligence are aligned along the same continuum. This is very much the point we are at with DMaaS. It is why investment in data protection is hotting up, and why organisations are beginning to see data protection as part of the overall data management picture.
It is no longer about simply storing data on the cloud, but how IT leaders can re-evaluate their data management strategy and vendor selection. Moving forward, as the amount of data grows with the business, strong data protection measures will help the organisation safeguard critical and valuable information. Although data protection may be a challenge for many organisations, it enables businesses to receive benefits such as a boost in return on investment, improved customer loyalty, and more efficient operations. The question is, how can businesses leverage more on data protection to serve the business?
