TECH TALK: Many organisations are failing to use data to its full potential or cost effectiveness, says NEIL CAMPBELL
Data is a major driving force in today’s economy, fuelling innovation in businesses, and now we are seeing a fundamental shift towards using the power of cloud for data management. It plays an increasing role in designing, delivering and transforming services to improve outcomes and drive cost efficiencies. However, many organisations still have a substantial amount of data that is not being used to its full potential.
The volume of data is increasing exponentially. A report from “IDC & Seagate Data Age 2025” predicts that the global data sphere will reach 175 zettabytes by 2025 when 49% of data will be in the public cloud and 30% will need to be processed in real time.
Many organisations are not yet equipped to deal with these ever-increasing volumes and still attempt to use outdated approaches to data quality and the management of data in the cloud.
The UK government has stated that it believes “organisations spend between 10-30% of revenue on handling data quality issues”. This clearly shows a massive opportunity for cost saving on data quality alone.
This increase in data volume is happening at a time when increased compliance requirements are being enforced at state and industry governance levels. At the end of last year, Ticketmaster and Marriott were fined £1.25 million and £18.4m respectively for failing to protect customer data. It is estimated that all GDPR fines issued to date account for more than £1.09 billion (€1.28bn).
In the organisations we interact with, we often see many hidden costs associated with data mismanagement that can have a massive impact on businesses:
- Expensive data handling costs
The same data is manually keyed into different systems.
- Excessive Storage
Data is retained long past its useful life either due to poor or no data archiving/destruction capabilities or the failure to use archiving/destruction capabilities properly.
- Lack of Insights
Data is difficult to extract and integrate across disparate systems meaning that organisations are missing out democratising data. This results in potentially critical data, that could be used to support business decisions, not being available to those who need it.
- Data decisions taken at a project / programme level
Data decisions being embedded within project, programme or service level decisions without consideration on how they affect the wider organisation over the lifespan of the data.
Data is an asset
The organisations using data effectively are those who see it as an organisational asset to be used when needed and securely disposed of when not.
They have a clear strategy for data, supported at the highest level of the organisation, and leverage cloud technologies and cost models that allow for the use of just-in-time, just the right amount of powerful data processing for storage, transformation, sharing and visualisation.
It is vital that data is considered at the beginning of any programme delivery, not only from a compliance perspective (are you dealing with sensitive data that may be protected under legislation?) but also so that the organisation is able to gain maximum value from the insights that the data may be able to deliver.
Organisations that have a clear strategy, ask the right data questions and use the cloud effectively are able to gain valuable insights while effectively managing data storage and processing costs, not to mention ensuring data compliance.
Neil Campbell is head of cloud & cyber at Exception, a digital services and solution provider dedicated to driving value through the power of technology.
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