There are some very good reasons that businesses want their data to be mobile and free of infrastructure constraints. Start with mobile users, remote offices, business partners, or dispersed manufacturing locations. Application data needs to be accessible everywhere, whenever required. But it doesn’t have to live everywhere. It just needs to be effortlessly and seamlessly accessible between data centers, among field locations, and to individual users at the edge. True data mobility means edge to core, to and from mobile devices, and to and from the cloud, as well as recovery / sharing to and from remote sites. All of this pushes us past data management based on the old constraints. The way we’ve always done it will no longer cut it. To quote Gartner, we must “manage the data not the infrastructure.”
Data mobility means immediate and self-service data access that enables accelerated application development, faster testing and business acceptance, more development output, improved productivity and improved time-to-impact business intelligence.
Data mobility is also about much more than movement. It’s about time.
Businesses seek to accelerate business advantage in the efficient management of time-to-value, time-to-insight, time-to-support, time-to-revise, time-to-market, and time-not-wasted.
Achieving all of that can result in significant advantages over old approaches, delivering timely, streamlined and demonstrable data agility through real-time access to data, virtually or physically, regardless of location. Data use requirements are simultaneously supported for application development, test, backup, disaster recovery, analytics, archive and more. Data virtualization represents a fundamental shift in approach to business agility and resiliency.
Then there are costs. The first that come to mind are strategies that lower storage, infrastructure, facility, and staff costs. But at least as critical is opportunity cost. The positive – seizing opportunity quickly and successfully. The negative – missing out from lack of insight and slow execution.
For example, one customer, a retail media supplier to some very big brand clients, was looking for a way to access and share large remote data sets. Their “remarkable” experience with Actifio Sky gave them “local access to remote data that we’d frankly never been able to quickly access before.” As a result, they have not only improved their data protection but added and accelerated services not previously possible. They seized the opportunity and did it fast.
We’re working with an increasing number of customers who have moved past primary backup and DR benefits to accelerated application test and development and expedited services development. Much of it based upon abilities to quickly access data regardless of location.
This new business value still includes the usual requirement for risk assessment and quality assurance. Mobile data must still be secure and careful data management must be in place for assurances to business intelligence and enhanced competitive positioning.
But suppose your business data isn’t available immediately where it’s needed most. Does that delayed access have a negative impact on sales, test/development, reporting or analytics? Does it mean you have an application backlog? Does it impact the bottom line?
As they eliminate siloed data environments we see more customers experiencing a big payoff. Not only do they improve overall data management, they overcome their challenges gaining agile data access for application development, business intelligence and cloud deployments.
They’re getting spending under control while preventing missed opportunities. They’re seeing the benefits of rapid innovation, of secure and immediate data availability at the right place and right time – for every application, every purpose and every audience wherever they are.
“Actifio Anywhere”
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