Data as the DNA of Business

This is the second article is a series of three sharing insights from Huawei’s May 2022 Innovative Data Infrastructure Forum in Munich. I was invited to the event by Huawei[L1]  to meet business leaders and discuss how  business innovation, accelerating transformation, and the green ICT agenda can be enabled by smart data infrastructures.

There is a growing conversation around the role of data in business and how a critical determinant of business success or failure will increasingly be the way we use and manage it. To explore this topic and the changing relationship of businesses to their data, I sat down with Ferhat Kaddour, VP of Sales and Alliances at Atempo – a provider of scalable data protection and management solutions. Here’s what he had to say.

Data = Business Value

What is the role of data in our organisations today?

Kaddour’s perspective is that all the intrinsic value in businesses now resides in our data – in getting it to and from customers in the right way and at the right time. Over the next ten years, he argues that data will become increasingly critical in understanding our operating environment and in identifying opportunities. It will also be central to the creation of our offerings, in communicating and delivering them to customers, and in monitoring their performance.

Our data is so important that we need to treat it like the Earth, if we don’t take care of it then we’re going suffer serious consequences. The health of the organisation will be directly linked to the health of our data. As data volumes continue growing and we increasingly build our propositions around the data, it will be ever more central to our business strategy, operations, and performance.

How can we maximise the value of our data?

Kaddour explained that data is not only what we hold inside the company but also the wider contextual information around it that gives it meaning, makes is usable, and ensures it is exchangeable with others. This implies we need both a robust infrastructural base on which to build our data solutions and sovereignty over that data. Security and privacy are key concerns here. Organisations hold our data across multiple heterogenous environments – this creates a challenge of making it compatible for exchange internally and externally and of ensuring the  ease of doing business. Data compatibility is also essential for innovation, commercial development, and as an enabler of growth for our customers, our company, and our partners.

Harnessing the Wind

What factors could have the greatest impact on our future data management strategies? Kaddour’s view is that there is a growing green challenge that comes with more data requiring more data storage and more data centres to house it - which in turn drive energy demand and carbon emissions. Managing this well, and avoiding massive unnecessary duplication of data, can drive down our environmental footprint significantly.

Our choices around new technologies from artificial intelligence (AI), distributed databases, the internet of things (IoT), and drone delivery through to edge computing, metaverses, and autonomous vehicles will have a massive impact on data volumes. These will all drive exponential  growth in the number of points / nodes in the network where data is generated that needs to be routed immediately to the appropriate places where it can be processed and stored. Managing this efficiently will have a massive impact on our overall ecosystem energy footprint.

What are the implications for how we manage burgeoning volumes of data?

Kaddour believes our core challenge is one of managing the evolving data ecosystem efficiently as more technologies and applications come into it. We need to ensure that, as the volume of data expands exponentially, we can get it to the right person at the right time for them to use and create value from it in the way that they want to.

Over the next few years, ever more powerful AI tools will deliver massive efficiency gains for users by increasingly anticipating their requirements. This means delivering the right data to the right place, so it is ready and waiting when they need it, rather than them having to wait for it to upload once they request it.

Atempo’s  positioning is that, for efficiency and effectiveness, data should have no borders and be allowed to flow wherever it needs to. This implies a shift to open ecosystems so that, wherever data is generated, it can be available on whatever application we want and on any device we choose to use. Their view is that our data should be accessible when and how we want to use it - without hurdles or complex conversion and reformatting requirements.

What are the security implications of such a free flowing and borderless approach to data?

Kaddour’s view is that robust data protection is a prerequisite of good data management. Security is like our blood – we need it at every level of the body or ecosystem. Hence, we need ‘security by design’ – embedding it as we are planning the evolution of our  ecosystems, applications, and devices – because it is very hard to retrofit good security. Security has to be part of the definition of requirements.

There is no perfect or ultimate solution here - security will always be a concern, there will always be new threats – and there will always be innovators finding smart new solutions to address those risks. Despite concerns over data duplication, he considers replication of data across multiple locations as essential to ensuring complete backup availability under a full range of failure scenarios. As data volumes and their applications grow and become more complicated and interlinked, a key priority is to make it easier not harder to conceive of security solutions and upgrades. We have to think about security at multiple levels - from ecosystem wide threats and application specific challenges, through to the protection and privacy of individual data everywhere it flows across the ecosystem.

Positioning for the Future

How might corporate approaches to managing their data evolve in the emerging future? Kaddour believes that customer maturity is evolving – although some more traditional views on IT still exist. However business needs are changing and expanding in multiple ways – such as the adoption of multi-cloud strategies and inventing new ways to reach and serve customers. This means there are successive waves of change coming into IT infrastructures and organisations are no longer looking at their IT infrastructure in monolithic ways.

Enterprises are increasingly evolving to a needs driven approach, focusing on the individual building blocks required to deliver on their rapidly evolving goals. E.g. cloud, more efficient storage, and better data management solutions. Businesses are starting to reinvent themselves to take control of, and extract benefits from, the new technologies that are emerging. These include AI powered data management and protection solutions, self-optimising storage, and better levels of data security. These will help organisations be more flexible, agile, and better able to embrace new workloads and deliver new propositions to their customers.

Conclusion – If Not Now, Why Not?

Ultimately, concludes Kaddour, everyone across the ecosystem needs to change and do it rapidly. We need to innovate more, do it faster, and extract the value from developments quickly before the market changes on us. This means taking full advantage of the best of breed solutions available in the market – those with the easiest learning curve, the smoothest and quickest path to adoption, and the lowest barriers in transitioning from legacy solutions.

Download the Huawei white paper on Global Energy Transition and Net-Zero Carbon Development.

Rohit Talwar is a global futurist and CEO of Fast Future.

Image Sources

[1] geralt https://pixabay.com/illustrations/covid-statistics-world-earth-virus-6918741/

[2] Shaferle https://pixabay.com/illustrations/freedom-silhouette-woman-2053281/

[3] geralt https://pixabay.com/illustrations/digitization-circuit-board-hand-6883780/