A bunch of us here at Actifio are hooked on Neil deGrasse Tyson’s big Cosmos remake on Fox and NatGeo. The other night it featured an elaborate animation of the comet strike that ended the era of the dinosaurs, and began that of the mammals.
It struck us as a pretty good metaphor for the state of the IT business right here in 2014. Upheaval and massive change mark the shifting of an era, with distinct losers and winners among the old guard and the new.
This time of change marks the shift toward what IDC called the “3rd platform,” built on social software, the cloud, big data, and mobility. The massive amount of new information and data growth created by new applications, new machines, and new users clicking away on their mobile devices is causing IT leaders to reevaluate their storage and data management systems. In light of this huge expansion in the creation and capture of data, the deployment of storage efficiency technologies and processes to deal with this data growth is essential for business resiliency and agility. After all, data is fueling the 3rd platform and the degree to which individuals, businesses, and governments are able to store, share, process, analyze, and access information is THE new competitive advantage.
Many of these ideas are captured in the recent Gartner report, 2014 Strategic Roadmap for Storage – March 2014 , where they found the following:
- The challenges IT leaders face caused by data growth are not new; but what has changed are the new technologies associated with capacity, availability and performance to address this issue.
- Global issues, including natural disasters, impact data storage, access, delivery and recovery.
- The evolving IT landscape requires IT leaders to reassess capabilities offered by vendors.
- Many IT staffers often do not have the skill sets to deal with technology changes.
Some of Gartner’s recommendations include:
- Manage data growth by fully deploying storage efficiency technologies and aligning information governance policies with business needs and regulatory requirements.
- Make risk/benefit and cost analyses part of all acquisition and infrastructure decisions.
- Shift from delivering infrastructure to providing services; build teams that include users and business managers.
- Train and retrain new and existing employees to cope with the rate of technology change.
Gartner continues in their report to state, “Over the next five years, information governance will become critical to manage data growth. Data management will include the blending of backup and archiving; retiring and deleting aging data; intelligently managing copies of data; and governing data as it moves to the cloud.”
Based on a modern architecture, supported by patented technology, and designed with the 3rd platform in mind, Actifio enables that intelligent management of data noted by Gartner. Our Copy Data Virtualization technology allows customers and service providers to decouple application data from physical infrastructure, enabling improved business resiliency, peerless agility, and seamless migration toward cloud-based systems. By deploying the Actifio platform, users can access data when and where they need it, while collapsing the infrastructure, complexity, and cost structure of the 20th century data management model.
In short, it gives our customers the agility to survive and thrive in the new era of data-driven business, keeping them on the “mammal” side of the transformative disruption underway right now.