Data matters more than ever in 2021

Without data, there is no business.

"Let’s face it: applications run the business — but applications run on data. Since 2006, the industry has been referring to data as the new oil. It’s what gives businesses a competitive advantage, making the need to protect and optimise its performance of the utmost importance to give the highest value back to the business," said Thomas LaRock, Head Geek, SolarWinds.

"Visibility is critical because database performance is often where the experience goes wrong. In 2021, it’s time to double down on database performance management. Ensuring your database performance in the cloud is at least as good as it is in your data centre is critical as IT organisations “lift and shift” more workloads to the cloud—something that’s been accelerating since the workforce went remote. Otherwise, the digital transformation you expect to deliver for your business can suffer, bringing your business down with it.

"Because the database is critical to infrastructure and application performance, IT pros and business leaders have to strike the right balance for their organisation’s growth, and grapple with making their data perform its best, regardless of where it resides. And while many look at either the applications, or the infrastructure supporting them, the data management itself is a top priority."

While LaRock commented on performance, there are other aspects of data management to consider.

Regaining control

Andy Ng, VP and MD, Asia South Region, Veritas Technologies, points out that dealing with data during the COVID pandemic in the initial stages has given way to a more measured data strategy.

"As organisations accelerated their cloud strategies to respond to the challenges of the global COVID pandemic, many put the priority on ‘just making things work’. Employees were given mobility solutions and remote access to data and applications to minimise work disruptions," he said.

"In the cloud-enabled distributed remote working environment, policies for creating, storing and sharing data weren’t always treated with the same level of priority. As a result, data created during the various lockdowns around the world has often been spread across a variety of end-user devices and cloud applications, in addition to, or instead of, the secure locations it really should have been (in)."

"A new data strategy has to emerge, as organisations begin 'the great data hunt' to regain control of information that was distributed beyond the data centre, to the cloud and the edge during the lockdown. As we head into 2021, organisations will be looking to take back control of this data to ensure that it’s both protected and compliant," Ng added.

"They won’t be able to turn the clock back to the time of the centralised office network, but they will need to leverage data protection and management tools that deliver visibility and security no matter where the data is located."

Data health

Christal Bemont, CEO, Talend predicted that business metrics will extend to measure data health or reliability. "Businesses can measure every aspect of their organisations but the reliability of their data.  A prolonged pandemic in 2021 will further expose the need to mitigate risk and maximise opportunities for businesses," she said.

"Implementing a measurement of data health that is verifiable and ensures clean, complete and uncompromised data will help businesses confidently make important decisions with speed. With reliable data, organisations will never have a scenario in which their data is like a game of Jenga blocks - one wrong move and the whole thing crashes."

Connecting the dots

"In the data management space, with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning becoming more pervasive, we are moving closer to a reality that bots will take a bigger role in enabling predictive insights for proactive monitoring for downtime and faults. This is a critical differentiator for organisations – with IT managers taking preventative action before a disruption ever occurs and giving people time to focus on valuable tasks. "

As businesses seek to keep pace with the rise and complexity of multicloud in the current climate, it is necessary to find a way to centralise an organisation’s data in order for AI to achieve its full potential," Ng of Veritas pointed out. 

"Many solutions come with a built-in data lake and associated analytic capabilities — think AIOps, SecOps, IDM, and ESM systems. But when connected, these data lakes have the potential to unleash the next generation of solutions to solve complex data problems," said Stephen McNulty, President Asia Pacific and Japan at Micro Focus. ESM stands for enterprise security management, while IDM stands for identity management.

"IT leaders will experience increasing pressure in 2021 to connect data lakes to automate and optimise organisations. The AIOps data lake needs to be correlated with the SecOps data lake to uncover advanced instruction patterns. The identity management data lake should be correlated with the enterprise service management data lake to identify misuse or governance issues.

"In 2021, we will see more companies trying to implement a true 360^o insight model for their enterprise. At the same time, many of the traditional approaches to this will fall short."

Data security

"Today, businesses have either already undergone significant digitalisation or are planning to do so in the coming year. As such, expect to see accelerated adoption of cloud-based and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services, which will then result in a heavier reliance on digital platforms for day-to-day functions. This represents added digital risk as attack surfaces and vectors continue to increase with remote and hybrid work environments," warned Kuma Ritesh, CEO & Founder, CYFIRMA.

"Organisations whose data management strategies are not comprehensive will face an uphill task figuring out how their data is segmented and tiered, how it is transported, where it sits at rest and who has rights to access which data. The entire journey of how data flows in and out of the organisation into employees, suppliers, partners, and clients presents many potential attack points for hackers.

"Business leaders must now shift their mindset to look at risk and governance from a ‘digital-first’ perspective. Digital risk exposure has direct impact on business growth and viability and will be a priority for CISOs in 2021.”

"Data security governance is a required and critical building block to threat mitigation. Until recently, most data governance programmes have focused on data flows and analytics without thinking much about security. New data privacy laws and regulations have forced data stakeholders such as the CDO, CFO, CISO, and DPO* to make data security one of the necessary building blocks of their data governance efforts," said Anne Hardy, CISO, Talend. 

"But data security governance is complex as no single vendor product can implement all required data security governance controls. In 2021, as businesses continue to collect and process more and more data, they will have to figure out how to quickly unify their information, so their entire organisation is drawing information from the same, trusted and secure well. Next, businesses need to implement and manage their data source through a data protection system with necessary privacy controls in place, so data threats are mitigated. These steps will ensure future business and financial risks are minimised."

"Data will continue being 'the name of the game' in our digital economy. Organisations that are ahead of the curve will be able to reap the full advantage of opportunities that lie ahead in the Asia Pacific region for 2021," concluded Ng of Veritas Technologies.

*The acronyms stand for: Chief Data Officer (sometimes Chief Digital Officer), Chief Financial Officer, Chief Information Security Officer, and Data Protection Officer.