Practical Data Management for Your Business

As the quantities of data collected by businesses continues to grow exponentially, effective data management becomes essential.

Burgeoning technologies such as IoT, IIoT, AI, smart cities and factories, plus advanced digital services, which 5G will usher in, all have a foundation of data management and storage.

Against this backdrop, Seagate has the insights and tools to enable all enterprises to successfully navigate what will increasingly become a data-driven marketplace. Only those businesses that have a well-defined data strategy will be leaders in their industries.

Stop Data Lakes Becoming Data Swamps

The efficient storage of mass data enables enterprises to use information as a core source of innovation. Yet the Seagate Rethink Data survey found that organizations estimate that only 32% of data available to enterprises is fully leveraged, with the remaining 68% is untapped and unused.

A big risk in any data lake project is that – if left unattended – it could turn into a data swamp, by which I mean a repository where unleveraged yet potentially useful data sits dormant.

As Alex Chen, senior director of Intelligent Storage Products at Alibaba Cloud, puts it: “Big data is the new oil. Computing is the engine, and a cloud-native data lake is an F1 race car. By bringing together big data and computing, the race car (data lake) allows business to drive fast across the various applications.”

To avoid your data lake becoming a data swamp, follow these three steps:

Clearly define a target or goal Data added to the lake then has a purpose. Your business can then apply AI analysis, for example, to reveal value in your data lake that directly supports your defined outcomes.

Capture as much data as possible. Your business will reach a critical mass of data that will then reveal insights when interrogated for value. Also, modular storage solutions such as Seagate’s new high-capacity Lyve Mobile enables businesses to aggregate, store, move, and activate their data between the edge and the cloud core. Lyve Mobile offers a faster way to move massive amounts of data physically from one storage location to another.

Audit and refresh your data lake regularly. To avoid your data lake becoming a data swamp, auditing and refreshing data is critical. Older data should be retained and moved to another repository. However, the working data your business is basing strategic decisions and service or product development upon, should be periodically renewed to maintain its value.

These vast quantities of data need to be stored efficiently. More importantly, the storage solutions your business chooses to support how this data will be used. Putting data to work is a core service Seagate Systems has been evolving.

Data Quality Control

Data is shifting to both the core and the edge: By 2025 nearly 80% of the world’s data will be stored in the core and edge, up from 35% in 2015. By 2025, IDC predicts 12.6ZB of installed capacity—HDD, flash, tape, optical—will be managed by enterprises. Cloud service providers will manage 51% of this capacity.

Getting value from all this data and activating its potential all rely upon trustworthy storage services that also allow data users the ability to leverage what can be vast datasets with ease.

The emerging discipline of DataOps can help your organisation empower users to leverage that data. It is defined as a new approach to managing and then utilizing information to transform business processes.

According to our recent report, Rethink Data, only an average of 10% of organizations report having implemented DataOps fully across the organisation. The opportunity is there for the taking. DataOps is neither a technology nor a process but rather an emerging discipline of connecting data consumers with data creators to enable collaboration and accelerate innovation.

How does your business become a data business? Follow these steps:

1. Audit your existing data storage and management capability. This will reveal where improvements need to be made.

2. Understand how data is used across your business. These insights will influence how your company creates its new approach to data as an asset.

3. It’s critical to have the right hardware infrastructure in place to support advanced data processing. Seagate has a range of hardware options to choose from.

4. Move your data to the edge. Our Rethink Data survey concluded that, on average, organizations periodically transfer about 36% of data from the edge to core. Within only two years this percentage will grow to 57%.

5. High-performance computing (HPC) environments are becoming commonplace for many enterprises that need powerful compute resources to engage with and extract value from often massive datasets they are managing. Seagate has been working with HPC service providers for decades to deliver the fundamental data storage capability, HPC needs to support next-generation product and service development

Says Phil Goodwin, research director, IDC: “Whether structured, semi-structured, or unstructured; generated by humans or by machines; or stored in the data centre or the cloud, data is the new basis of competitive advantage.”

Partnered with Seagate’s experience, knowledge, and products, your business can start making the most of that competitive advantage today.

Discover how your business can unlock the value and insights of your data. Learn how Seagate can help your business become a data-centric enterprise.