Accelerating the Data-Driven Enterprise

Data-driven has never meant more to business than it does today. But achieving it has never been more complicated.

Organizations engineered to be data-driven are empowering customers with digital products and experiences that have been optimized by the access to real-time data. In these environments, applications and data are more readily available and accessible from modern, high performance and protected digital cores that span data center, edge and cloud. And, behind the scenes, the data-driven enterprise can automatically serve up the most valuable insights to internal stakeholders and applications across an optimized data fabric, all of which is supported by automated DataOps.

A recent report from McKinsey found that analytics-based organizations are 23 times more likely to win customers, six times more likely to retain their customers, and 19 times more likely to be profitable. And a recent study from ESG Global found that 59% of organizations are using data to drive revenue.

But getting there is easier than it sounds.

The systems and interconnected cloud platforms that process, analyze and share the data grow more complex. So complex, that data access and availability can be stalled if not blocked outright from ever making it into the digital experience. Compounding these challenges is the global skills shortage which can restrain companies from adopting new approaches to things like software and cloud development, data science and AI – approaches that can help them advance and innovate. In fact, a recent study found that two-thirds of organizations aren't seeing the benefits they expected from cloud because of security and compliance issues, legacy infrastructure and application sprawl, or a lack of cloud skills.

Unraveling the Complexities

What's needed to begin unravelling the complexities of the fast-growing distributed hybrid multicloud world, is a consistent, automated, and modern approach to the enterprise that spans across the entire environment; what's needed are simplified and automated operations that seamlessly bridge from DevOps teams and processes to IT operations.

This is critical because for the vast majority of businesses, IT has evolved from playing a supporting role, to one of enablement, to where it is today – at the heart of the business. In this new world, the shift to simplification of operations is mandatory, from DevOps with modern, cloud management services, to IT operations, where touchless automation is built in.

We furthered our commitment to such an effort this week with an array of new cloud management and application services, as well as smarter, cloud-ready infrastructure systems and software all designed to accelerate an organization's pace of innovation by automating and integrating operations intelligently.

Automated Management Services

From the services perspective, I've found that most organizations embarking on the digital transformation, look for assistance determining when and where to engage cloud in the first place. Modernization services can help by determining which applications to retire, rehost and reengineer. Extending deeper, cloud operation services can offload the deployment and management of applications from the business, freeing it up to conduct their core business, all while measuring against key performance indicators.

Cloud-Ready Infrastructure

There is, of course, a lot of infrastructure behind the cloud. And the more intelligence and automation that can be built into it, the better. We've built just such automation into our data storage systems that enable them to be automatically updated, whether they're in a cloud environment or on-premises. We also have tools that can automate about 90% of all the manual tasks associated with the system, freeing up admins to do more critical work.

Driving Data Home

A good example of a company that has ridden these trends is the fintech firm, Deluxe Payment Exchange. Deluxe, which supports four million small businesses and 4,000 financial institutions, processes more than $2.8 trillion in annual payment volumes.

The company was tasked with engineering its entire digital business from scratch. Hitachi Vantara helped them by initially building a private cloud that reduced their IT costs and sped up new application deployment. We then helped them scale to the public cloud. That transformed their cadence of product rollouts and helped them introduce new services that used to take weeks, in only days or even hours.

What's more, by managing their cloud services, Hitachi Vantara helped Deluxe deliver yearly cost reductions across cloud environments by right sizing their infrastructure based on actual consumption. And all of that has freed up funds for investment back into the business.

A Strong Digital Core for the Data-Driven

Whether migrating and managing applications in the cloud or bringing cloud operating models to their private data centers, organizations are seeing the value in the holistic approach to the data-driven enterprise.

A strong, agile digital core combined with easily automated cloud management services is the way through the complexity of today's distributed hybrid multicloud world. When this is achieved, resource constraints can be loosened and data and insights can flow freely. These are the environments in which data-driven digital experiences can flourish, and profound economic, environmental, and social progress can be realized.

Related News

• Data-Driven and Cloud Ready Infrastructure – The Q&A with Russell Skingsley
• Cloud Management for the Modern Workload – The Q&A with Premkumar Balasubramanian
• Hitachi Vantara – All Systems Go
• Read the Press Release: Hitachi Launches New Application Reliability Services
• Read the Press Release: Hitachi Launches New Data Infrastructure Solutions for Private and Hybrid Cloud