WIREDGOV

In this guest blog, Patrick Smith, Field CTO, Pure Storage looks at the need for businesses to tap into data through analytics to guide strategy and decision-making.

In evolutionary theory, the red queen hypothesis suggests that species must constantly adapt, evolve, and reproduce, in order to keep up with their competitors.

The same concept could be applied in today’s hyper-competitive business landscape. Driven by massive tectonic shifts in business models thanks to cloud computing and smart devices, entire sectors are having to embrace technology and leverage data to transform and stay ahead of their competition. COVID-19 has not only intensified this clamour, but also offered many businesses and organisations the opportunity to understand their customers, partners and stakeholders better thanks to the massive volume of information they come across everyday. By 2022, 90 percent of corporate strategies will explicitly mention information as a critical enterprise asset and analytics as an essential competency, according to Gartner.

Amidst crowded competition, the ability to tap into this data through analytics to guide strategy and decision-making will be the key to winning this innovation arms race. We’re already seeing industry frontrunners deliver cutting-edge experiences through the use of data in increasingly creative ways whether it's the use of social media data to predict the next snack trends or the algorithms deployed to deliver hyper-personalised Netflix recommendations.

Countless examples like these demonstrate how analytics can deliver measurable impact regardless of the sector. However, despite the clear benefits and ability to catalyse digital transformation, the path to designing a data infrastructure ripe for analytics isn’t so straightforward.

Addressing the cultural and infrastructure obstacles

In many instances, the challenges are two-fold. Oftentimes, the problem is not about having enough data, but deciding where to begin. Organisations are inundated with data - a challenge that will only be exacerbated by the proliferation of connected devices. In fact, 60 percent of IT and data professionals regard the sheer volume of data sources as the most common data quality issue. Secondly, most organisations’ storage environments are not set up for analytics.  While the volume of data has exponentially increased alongside the capacity for developing richer insights, most of these data sets exist in silos, in the form of data lakes, warehouses and AI clusters.

Aside from structural challenges, human factors can also impede this transformation. Storage administrators face a range of issues such as lack of internal alignment across business functions, or poor understanding of the processes and tools involved in managing storage and controlling access to the data. All this adds layers of complexity when trying to get analytics projects off the ground. This uncertainty is also observed among employees who revealed they are unsure of their ability to effectively manage data as part of their day to day activities.

For IT teams to move past these hurdles, both cultural and structural shifts are required. The value of analytics allows organisations  to move from being reactive to predictive, leading to demonstrable business successes ensuring the value of data is fully appreciated.

Creating a modern data platform designed for winning

With COVID-19 not retreating anytime soon, the pivot toward digitalisation of everything is set to carry on and businesses will be forced to adapt or risk losing out, if not close shop altogether. Businesses must think about laying a modern foundation to manage enormous amounts of data by thinking about the performance, consolidation and simplicity of their storage system in a unified fashion. Only then will they be able to extract real value from their most-prized yet under utilised asset - vital to decision making that can propel the business ahead of the competition. It will be a constant race, and one that will be won with data managed well and used well. Learn more at https://www.purestorage.com/uk/. 

At next week's techUK Future Summit, Pure Storage will delve into this topic in more detail during the breakout session on Data and AI. You can book your place for the Future Summit here.