Two of the most valuable treasures in today’s organization are the people who work there, and the data it owns. The recent global situation has made day-to-day tasks harder, while the data needed for good decision-making is more voluminous and varied than ever. Derek Britton examines a new cultural imperative of Empowered Insight.
Stay Home, There’s a Storm Coming
It has been quite a year. The shift to the new normal in 2020 has put even further strain on busy organizations. Industry heavyweights are shifting their perspective on the future of office life: Microsoft recently announced that working at home would remain an option for everyone long-term, the latest in a growing list of major employers to support remote working. This means the simple things, such as the laptop you use, the connections you expect, the files you rely on, and the people you work with all had to change. “Remote collaboration in some form or another is the new normal,” as this blog states. Users, administrators, and teammates can assume nothing, while their infrastructure, and means of collaboration, require hasty renewal.
At the same time, the task of collecting, storing, managing, protecting/backing up, and deriving insight from data has continued to accelerate. According to reports, 90 percent of the data in the world was generated within the last two years, while IDC attempted to quantify the near future by predicting the total volume of data worldwide will nearly quadruple between 2019 and 2025, to reach 175 Zettabytes.
The world turning upside down did not make it any less busy, nor is it any simpler.
Challenges Ahead?
Rising volumes and diversity of data make the task of managing it a greater necessity while increasing change and complexity for key staff also threatens to undermine their productivity. The challenges are therefore as pressing as they are diverse.
- With data from an unprecedented array of sources, both human and device-based, how can that lifecycle be effectively managed and controlled securely and efficiently?
- Regulatory compliance commands us to keep an eye on archived data. Such is the regularity and importance of those governance rules, we need to treat archived data with the same discipline and efficiency as if it were active, live data. Simply put, compliance archiving needs to be always-on, high-performance, and efficient.
- Strategically, how do we find and consume all the necessary data to examine and determine the right course of action? Indeed, how do we determine those insights from such a vast assembly of different sources?
- The increasing quantity, type and location of the data, combined with the change in work locations and practices make it more vulnerable than ever to attack, corruption or loss. Organizations need to ensure copies are protected and recoverable in a simple efficient and rapid manner to minimize disruption and downtime.
- In the new normal, how do organizations keep their workers productive with the right software, manage applications and patches on their hardware, and protect sensitive information no matter where they are located?
- Finally, how do organizations provide tools that offer the right information for teams to work together -- whether they're across the table or the world?
Know Your Data, Empower Your People, Drive Your Future
Times change, individuals’ requirements change, and there is more information to manage, and more requirements to manage it. Today’s focus is clear:
- Actionable, manageable data: How quickly can your data become something to act upon? Analyzing your growing amounts of data, while still respecting governance and privacy mandates can make this a hard balancing act. Your data lifecycle management and governance discipline must support any data from anywhere –and provide analytics, compliance, management, privacy, and archiving capabilities as fast and as secure as the business demands it.
- Productive, empowered people: With a newly distributed workforce, access to apps, systems, and even desktops is critical. Your organization’s end-user collaboration and productivity technology must provide a new-normal ready flexible, smarter, more collaborative working environment. With today’s mantra being “work from anywhere”, the control of the working environment must be in the hands of those who need it the most—the user.
This is today’s objective, and today’s reality: know your data, empower your people, drive your future. At the heart of this belief is the Micro Focus Information Management and Governance (IM&G) solution, plus decades of knowledge and experience, supporting thousands of customers worldwide. Our solutions set out to tackle the aforementioned challenges with clear, comprehensive, and class-leading technology:
- Secure Content Management – Manage all business data from start to finish
- Archiving and Risk Management – Streamline compliance archiving
- Enterprise-Scale Data Analytics - Turn data into strategic insight
- Endpoint Management and Protection - Manage and protect users and devices
- Mission Critical Data Recovery – Back-up and restore vital business data
- Collaboration Solutions – Safely share, anywhere
Pushing towards a digital future while embracing the new normal means being able to act on data quickly and having empowered teams ready to make the necessary change. As a recent Forbes article commented, “COVID-19 will be remembered for many things and what’s becoming indisputable is how it is rapidly transforming business”.
Learn More
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