Data management minds discuss the digital landscape
Fri 10 Jul 2015
Leading data management minds joined a roundtable discussion last week on why data management has become a top priority for all organisations whether in the private sector, or in the public sector. The panel included representatives from data management firm Commvault, the University of Aberdeen, data experts Coolspirit, and analyst IDC.
Carla Arend, programme director for european software at IDC opened the discussion with a look at the data management landscape with particular focus on the third platform. This will include robotics, cognitive systems, 3D printing and most importantly the Internet of Things.
Carla said that this innovation wave will have a major impact on the data centre as consumers want to interact in real-time through social networks and mobile applications, and businesses want to offer an instant multi-channel experience.
Nigel Tozer, agreed that the third platform was driving changes: “For many CIO and CTOs today, the situation is challenging. Traditional IT, with its solid processes and relatively slow pace of change, is under threat. Consumer-led expectations and the desire to monetise mobile, social, cloud and big data capabilities demand a rapid response and much higher levels of innovation from IT. Data is growing at an astronomical speed every year, and companies don’t know what to do with all the data, let alone how to manage it or protect it.”
Glen Douglas, server operations team lead at the University of Aberdeen shared that they had 140TB that needed protecting and backing up. He spoke of the challenges the University faced when its legacy estate system needed updating. Like other public sector organisations the challenges lay in holding vast quantities of data, enabling usability and meeting compliance regulation all within tight budgets.
The key drivers he said, were time, cost, compliance and where possible making the system future proof. This he felt would be achieved as he had chosen a system that would easily transition to the cloud.
Coolspirit enterprise solutions architect Mike Henry said that while some sectors had fully embraced cloud, they often had unrealistic expectations that cloud would solve all their problems, which it hadn’t. Conversely, other organisations often in the public sector were still wary of the benefits and safety of the cloud.
Although it was agreed, that there was some guess work around which technologies will really take off and those that will die out, it was agreed that data was not going to get any smaller and a data management strategy that was flexible was a sure thing.
