Managing data has never been as important for companies as it is now

There is a total over-abundance of data reverberating out there. In order to ignore the noise, and find the really valuable data that can be used to great strategic advantage in the day-to-day operations of companies, proper data management is needed – now, more than ever before.

So said Johann Evans, chief technical officer at Cherry Olive, the unified data management specialists.

One of the IT areas that will need to change, said Evans, will be companies’ data centres.

He said the economic downturn of 2009 is in a hangover stage, but is still badly affecting businesses and IT. “Indeed, many IT organizations were faced with little or no capital budget, no additional head count, and – at the same time – an urgent, and growing, demand for IT services.

“In order to keep their doors open, business were forced to save every cent possible, or, conversely, whatever they spent had to bring with it tangible results – including in the IT side of the business.
“Companies automated business processes as fast as they could to increase enterprise-wide productivity, including the one-on-one increase of user productivity.”

Evans said these dynamic business demands, combined with often severe budget restrictions, have become part and parcel of normal day-to-day business activities.

“But there is a very real possibility that budgets will not return to the same pre-2009 levels, when the financial meltdown hit global markets after the collapse of investment bank, Lehmann Brothers. So what we have right now, is an increase in demand for IT as a service – but data centres need to often operate on an oil rag. Additionally, as panic spread in 2010 and 2011 as the financial recession continued to bite, this desperation felt by many businesses began to inspire innovation.”

Public cloud computing became an increasingly popular choice for IT services and, although numerous issues remain, many organisations have grown accustomed to consuming IT as a service.

According to a recent report by Gartner the demand for IT as a service, together with the need to reduce costs, has pushed data centres to the very edge of a new transformation. Gartner believes that what we are likely to increasingly see is the rise of public cloud computing. Together with this we will witness an increasingly complex mobile and remote workforce which will pressurize IT organisations to offer IT infrastructure as a service, that can not only compete on price and agility with external providers, but also offer the security and assurance needed to house business-critical applications and data.