tips from Three trends that will affect your data management in 2023
Data is important to your business. How important is data management? Well, consider that data-driven companies:
• Are 58% more likely to exceed revenue targets.
• Add an average of 5.32% to your annual revenue while decreasing your annual operating costs by 4.85%.
• They are 23 times more likely to acquire new customers and nine times more likely to retain them.
As a business leader, you have a lot on your mind as 2023 gets underway in earnest, but you can’t afford to forget the importance of your company’s data. Equally important is how your company is managing and protecting its data. Consider this:
• On average, 52% of an organization’s data is “obscured”, meaning it is not classified and therefore not being used to generate any business benefit.
• Nine out of ten organizations have experienced ransomware attacks, which target critical business data with the intent to encrypt and steal it for extortion purposes.
So, not only is poor data management leaving money on the table, but it also creates immense data security and compliance and governance risks.
All of this combined illustrates why you should care about data management in 2023, and you need to be aware of the following three key trends that will affect you.
Economic Uncertainty
A recession, or a non-recession, that is the question. Economic experts say we’re not officially in a recession yet, but most analysts still expect one in 2023. As such, you’re almost certainly already weighing your options if the time comes to make tough decisions. These decisions may involve reducing headcount and stopping new and current business transformation projects, especially those viewed as operating expenses versus capital expenditures.
This project could very well be your move to the cloud, something I’ve written about extensively. No doubt this transformation will continue (60% of enterprise data is already in the cloud) and will continue to involve a multi-cloud approach (89% of cloud organizations already have a multi-cloud architecture). But given that the cost benefits of cloud can be a little tricky to maintain (94% of companies fail to stay within their cloud budgets), further cloud transformation may be on hold until we get out of this period of economic uncertainty.
How does this affect your data management strategy?
You and your IT department need to be prepared to continue to manage a multi-cloud hybrid environment where your data is split nearly halfway between your on-premises infrastructure and your public cloud service providers. This will lead to greater demand for data integration, which means visibility and control of your data no matter where it resides. This will be easier if you consolidate your control of data using one platform that can manage data across all your environments — on-premises, virtual and multi-cloud. Platforms with autonomous data management are also critical as IT teams will be asked to do more with less.
The ubiquity of cybercrime
Cybercrime is almost as old as the computer itself, but without fail, its spread increases every year. Cybercriminals know the value of your data, maybe even better than you do. Ransomware is the attack of the day they are using it to profit from your data at your expense. Today, double and triple extortion tactics that up the ante by threatening to sell or leak sensitive data are table stakes. And the nefarious innovation will continue.
Trying to stop these attacks and ensuring your resilience are key elements of cyber resiliency, but in 2023 you must go deeper. You need to improve proactively reducing the level of risk in the event of an attack. It’s about increasing the observability of your data. A full and complete understanding of what types of data you have allows you to assess how much it is worth and who needs access to it. These, in turn, inform where it should be stored and how access is managed. A key part of this is also “eliminating the ROT” (Redundant, Obsolete and Trivial Data).
Ultimately, this will allow you to limit your exposure when, not if, your data is attacked.
Digitization 3.0 in data management
Like cybercrime, the digitization of the customer experience is almost as old as the computer itself, but it has really come into its own in the mobile age. What some call digitization 1.0 was all about “mobile and streamlined design and new types of apps”. Digitization 2.0 has enhanced customer demand — “apps anywhere, anytime, on any interface and with any method interaction: voice, social media, chat, texting, wearables and even when you’re sitting down in your car”.
What I’m calling digitization 3.0 here is a duplication of 1.0 and 2.0 to make data even more usable and provide unprecedented access to it. A key theme throughout this article has been the value of data. Companies that figure out how to do this to extract even more value from their data while maintaining its security, resiliency and privacy will be the ones that not only survive today’s economic uncertainty, but thrive during and after it.
The key to this next phase of the journey is not only being able to have visibility and control of all your data, no matter where it lives, but also being able to tag and contextualize everything so you can create experience-driven workflows. of user. around it. For example, imagine if you could analyze all of your data to see who interacts the most with a key customer, and then use sentiment analysis on the data to see if that’s increasing the customer’s desire to spend more with your business. .
In closing: Care about your data. Worry about its management and protection. And be prepared to address these trends that will impact everything in 2023.
*Gustavo Leite is Vice President for Latin America at Veritas Technologies