We are delighted to have just held our sixth Vision Solution Day in Melbourne, where we were joined by a record number of our customers and partners keen on understanding the latest perspectives on the data revolution.
How do you effectively realise value from your data, while protecting and securing it to the levels demanded by regulators and customers in today’s data-driven world? This is the key question we asked a group of experts from around the world.
Executives from organisations including Pacific Magazines, global construction and engineering group BG&E, reinsurance giant Munich RE and Victorian Government ICT services provider Cenitex, shared the ups and downs of their own digital journeys.
We also discussed how the agility and speed of the cloud was helping companies drive innovation with Lizelle Hughes from AWS. Jamie Humphrey, ANZ Managing Director of cloud computing software company Nutanix, shared his insights on the increasing use of hybrid and multi-cloud environments in a one-on-one discussion with me on-stage.
Rick Clarke, founder of APTARE -- the platform we recently acquired to enhance the analytics, reporting and protection of enterprise infrastructure and data -- revealed how easy it can be to take back control of your environments, while InfoTrust CEO, Dane Meah shared valuable insights on the growing threat of ransomware in Australia (alarmingly, the quickest hackers can be in and out in only 18 minutes!).
We also heard from Veritas’ Executive Vice President of Appliances and SDS, Phil Brace, who shared his experience helping some of the world’s largest organisations with their biggest data management challenges such as always-on availability, security, and gaining insights from the masses of data they accumulate.
A common theme throughout the day was that data management – in all its facets: from collecting, securing and accessing it, to interrogating and getting value out of it – is becoming a top business priority for organisations all over the world.
Whether you’re a bank offering online services, an engineer working with detailed plans and imagery, an insurance agency measuring risk, or a mining company operating driverless machinery, today, data is at the heart of everything we do. Every malicious threat aims to exploit this data and regulations govern how this data should be stored, managed and protected.
Dealing with these challenges is incredibly difficult in an increasingly complex, highly regulated, customer-focused business environment.
Where do you start?
Let’s face it. Managing data is a complex issue. It creates many challenges.
Firstly, just consider the amount of data we’re collecting and storing. It’s estimated that in five years the amount of data collected across the world will total more than 175 zettabytes – which equates to the amount of storage available on more than 25 trillion 64 gigabyte iPhones – and we’re really only just getting started.
Once we’ve collected it, then what? How do we identify what’s valuable and what’s just taking up storage space? What needs to be available? What can be archived? What can be deleted?
Take the example of one of the world’s leading financial institutions who, after implementing APTARE, discovered it was storing 27 million web caching files it didn’t need. With one keystroke it was able to free up a petabyte of storage space.
How do we keep up with increasing local and international laws and regulations around managing data? It’s estimated that 52% of enterprise data remains ‘dark’ so how do we manage it when we don’t even know exactly what we’ve got, or even where all of it is stored?
How do we make sure our data is properly protected against increasing threats such as ransomware which is now estimated to cost organisations more than $30 billion a year?
But despite these significant challenges, no one I spoke to was willing to put data management into the ‘too hard basket’ and there’s a simple reason for that: the opportunities that data creates.
Take publisher Pacific Magazines for example. Its use of data and the cloud to empower its digital transformation saw its business grow by more than 70% year-on-year. One of its biggest challenges was trying to keep up with that growth which, as Pacific’s Will Everett told us, was a nice problem to have.
At Veritas, data has been our business since the year dot. We’ve been helping businesses back up and recover it for more than 20 years in Australia alone.
So it’s only a natural progression for us to be in the business of helping people to better manage and take advantage of it:
- to make it always available, visible and useable
- to protect it against natural and unnatural disasters and malicious threats
- and to allow businesses to regain control of their data by gaining insights from it to drive innovation and success.
That’s why we created a new way to manage data complexity which we call abstraction: which is about extracting complexity from the data we collect.
Our Enterprise Data Services Platform offers solutions in the three areas that matter most: availability, protection, and insights.
- It’s the most versatile and extensible platform available to enterprises and represents the perfect foundation to make the most of the data revolution which, let’s face it, is still in its infancy.
- It’s built on a NetBackup 8.2 core and supports more than 500 data sources, over 150 storage targets, and can operate across more than 60 cloud platforms – and it can be deployed in any form factor today.
- It ensures applications are always available and deliver on even the strictest of SLAs that your business demands, whether it’s virtual, on-premise or in the cloud.
- It keeps data protected at scale and makes sure it's always recoverable no matter where it lives with simplified, robust, data protection solutions.
- It will also help you gain key insights into your data that will allow you to increase operational efficiency, optimise costs, and be prepared for current and new regulations.
In an era where businesses need to be fast and agile, more customer-focused and do more with less, making sure your data is available when you need it, protected as it should be and easily interpreted to drive growth is a key to the future success of any modern organisation.
Please visit our website to find out more about our Enterprise Data Services Platform.
