Three challenges CIOs must overcome to excel in the data era: Dell Technologies

Today, business landscape around the world has transformed manifold due to the unprecedented circumstances. Economic pressures, coupled with current challenges has forced organizations to fight to stay relevant - and this is where CIOs holds the key. This is because an organization’s competitive advantage is directly determined by how rapidly it turns its data into the meaningful insights that drive business outcomes.

There is no doubt that organizations today are understanding the importance of deriving valuable insights from their data to ensure better customer experience and gain an edge over their competitors.

Emerging technologies are disrupting and reinventing customer experiences, and with increasingly empowered consumers demanding more data-rich, personalized experiences, comes rich opportunities. Thus, CIOs face no shortage of competing projects and priorities, but with many projects on hold due to economic uncertainty, picking the right areas to advance is critical. Businesses can embrace their digital futures, accelerating the cycle of innovation and creating competitive differentiation, if they re-focus and commit to conquering three key challenges.

· Managing data: Distributed, diverse and dark

Data has grown extensively and today’s data management techniques are not able to manage them in a desired way. For example, CIOs need to embrace data siloes as we move away from centralized data strategies. This data sprawl is being driven by increasingly distributed data as IoT technologies fuel edge computing. Gartner predicts that 75% of all enterprise-generated data [1] globally will be created and processed outside a traditional centralized data center or cloud by 2025. As the number of edge locations generating data grows, centralized data strategies that transfer distributed data to the cloud simply won’t be able to keep up with the real-time demands.

This growing complexity has implications for regulatory and security compliance. In an increasingly connected world, with edge computing locations multiplying, there is an increased surface for attack, which is getting exploited, as a result of increased remote work. This makes it increasingly important for businesses to stay on top of compliance, even as the pace of change quickens.

CIOs can re-think and transform data management for the data era by taking on a few key actions like - democratizing business data so that teams can easily find and access the high-quality, production-ready data sets. They should even look to provide data engineers and scientists easy access to the tools required to deliver valuable business insights. And finally, deploying and managing data, applications and infrastructure in a consistent way across the entire IT landscape.

· Taking innovation to the edge

Edge computing is a key board room discussion in current times and Gartner predicts that by 2022, more than 50%[2] of enterprise data globally will be created and processed outside the data center or cloud. Going forward, most data will be generated at the edge and as per a study, 76% businesses [3]in India agreed that they are investing in Edge.

As data’s center of gravity rapidly turns toward the edge, organizations are asking IT to deliver more and more of these real-time, quality-of-service, fraction-of-a-second functions in decentralized locations. Organizations are recognizing that it’s not always practical to transfer distributed data to centralized infrastructure in a data center or public cloud in order to process and analyze the data in a timely way. Rather, moving infrastructure closer to edge locations where the data is being generated is a more strategic approach for them.

Hence, it is crucial to note that there is no one-size-fits-all solution, and CIOs need to invest in secure infrastructure edge management platforms that enables the generation and processing of vast amounts of data.

· Empowering people: Setting culture and getting the team right

To reap the full value of business data, time needs to be applied to data innovation and monetization. Yet most of the businesses are not able to utilise the time of their resource in extracting the real value of their data.

Most of the organizations today are missing the key data roles and skill sets required to setup an intelligent business. Data Scientists are highly skilled, specialized and in demand, hence they are expensive resource. This makes their time even more precious and CIOs must ensure that data scientists time is spent on specialized tasks that bring is more value to the company

Times have changed, so has organizations’ IT strategies. With the right infrastructure, data management strategy and people in place, any businesses today can thrive in the data era, to uncover and capitalize on the true value of data and meet the rising demand of their customers.