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Bill McGloin, Computacenter’s Storage and Data Optimisation Practice Leader, explains how organisations can extract greater business value from the growing volume of workplace data Understand, analyse, exploit Vision

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Bill McGloin, Computacenter’s Storage and Data Optimisation Practice Leader, explains how organisations can extract greater business value from the growing volume of workplace data

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Page 1: Understand analyse exploit

Bill McGloin, Computacenter’s Storage and Data Optimisation Practice Leader, explains how organisations can extract greater business value from the growing volume of workplace data

Understand, analyse, exploit

Vision

Page 2: Understand analyse exploit

Every new device that comes online in the workplace means more data – on the network, in the datacenter, in the archive. Everywhere.

Whether it’s a smartboard, a tablet, a security camera or a virtual desktop, it will be contributing to the world’s growing data mass, which is predicted to hit 7.9 zettabytes by 2015.

Mobile and video traffic are key factors in this data explosion; for example it is predicted that video content will constitute 91 per cent of global network traffic by 2014.1 While the growth of ‘bring your own device’ schemes mean that employees are increasingly using smartphones at work, with 52 per cent of organisations already allowing some form of network access for personal devices.2

As well as generating vast amounts of digital content from video-conference recordings, instant message exchanges, email attachments and corporate collaboration sites, today’s workplace activities also result in a large volume of ‘shadow data’. In fact shadow data, which includes web search histories and account access journals, now out-paces user-generated data by several gigabytes per person in an average year.

But does all this information really need to be stored? And, for how long? Duplication is rife in today’s data and device-intensive workplace, which means organisations often end up storing multiple copies of the same document resulting in unnecessary cost and complexity.

Good data, bad data By understanding data sources and the information generated by applications and users alike, IT departments will be able to take a more cost-effective tiered approach to storage – and even start to apply deletion policies.

Computacenter offers a number of data classification and optimisation assessments that help organisations understand their data – structured and unstructured – and develop cost-effective and scalable management strategies.

The assessments help to identify data sets and sizes, instances of duplication, unused and reclaimable capacity and unauthorised and ascertain different retention requirements.

This discovery process is also the first step towards unlocking the hidden value in current and historical workplace data. And

leveraging this value to make more informed decisions – whether it involves developing a new product, expanding into a new territory or identifying service improvement initiatives.

According to Accenture, 40 per cent of such business decisions are still made based on judgment alone, partly because of the absence of good data.3

Data equals power Data analysis removes this guesswork by enabling organisations to harness the intelligence that already exists in the files and logs stored in their datacenters.

However too many reports and projections can cause more harm than good at the start of the analytics maturity curve. Investment should therefore be incremental, with a focus on high-impact areas where quick wins can be achieved.

For example, UK financial services companies must now record and store relevant mobile phone conversations; while it is important for this data to be on or near-line, it does not need to sit on the highest performing, most expensive storage environment.

A data assessment enables organisations to recognise the access patterns of their data; for example when voice recordings have been accessed and by whom. By understanding which pieces of data are accessed most commonly, IT departments will be able to assess their corporate value and prioritise and plan for similar instances of data. As well as finding the right analysis tool, organisations may also need to transform how they collect, store, cleanse and aggregate their data to ensure they achieve maximum value

– especially if they are using a suite of disparate workplace applications and databases.

By exploiting the growing volume and variety of workplace data, organisations will be able to gain greater knowledge about their customers, operations, costs and risks. And turn this knowledge into power.

1 Cisco Visual Networking Index2 www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-170175703 Getting Serious About Analytics, Accenture, 2011

Vision