Many modern business leaders now understand that if they are to master digital transformation, they must solve the growing challenges around data management, protection, and governance.

A recent Hitachi Vantara report found that 6 in 10 business leaders are already overwhelmed by the amount of data their companies store, and 75% are concerned that their current infrastructure can’t scale to future needs. The Uptime Institute also reports in a data resiliency survey that 80% of data center managers have experienced some type of outage in the past three years.

Chandana Gopal, a research director at IDC, says the vast majority of CEOs – 95% – say they want a “digital first” organization and 25% say their company is now on that journey.

Gopal stresses that industry has spent a lot of money at managing data and analytics: $290 billion in 2022 alone.

However, Gopal says 82% still store data in silos and 2 out of 3 organizations lack AI investments to improve data usage. Another 31% have a data technology debt, meaning they have not modernized legacy data.

So how can organizations innovate while still managing their technology debt? IDC developed the Four Pillars of Enterprise Intelligence:

• Information synthesis: Access and analyze internal and external data to generate insights and create knowledge. The idea: convert data to knowledge.
• Insights delivery: Empower all levels of the organization with the insights they need at the right time. IDC has found that companies do a good job offering dashboards to top executives, but they need to drive data analysis capabilities to rank-and-file workers. Only 30% of organizations do this today.
• Collective learning: Continuously and collectively learn via the capture, curation, and sharing of knowledge. It’s not enough to analyze data, companies must use this knowledge to learn from it and not repeat the same mistakes.
• A strong data culture: Foster and embrace a data-driven culture, and offer the technology and skills to improve data literacy. Everyone in the organization must be able to make data-driven decision.

Gopal says this ability to create a data-driven culture leads to much-improved business outcomes. IDC found that companies with strong enterprise intelligence experience 55% greater business benefits than those companies with poor enterprise intelligence. “And this is across their financial, operational, and customer metrics, any metric that’s important to the business improves as the organizations becomes more data-centric,” says Gopal.

Hitachi Vantara aims to help organizations achieve many of the goals Gopal outlines with its Hitachi Vantara Virtual Storage Platform One. The new VSP One platform promises a single approach to data management that organizations need to unlock the full potential of their data and drive better business outcomes. VSP One will roll out in the first part of 2024.

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