Home › Posts tagged data-first

Tag: data-first

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

As companies lean into data-first modernization to deliver best-in-class experiences and drive innovation, protecting and managing data at scale become core challenges. Given the diversity of data and range of data-inspired use cases, it’s important to align with a robust partner ecosystem. This can help IT teams map the right set of services to unique workflows and to ensure that data is securely managed and accessible regardless of location.

Data volume has become a challenge for organizations as the size and velocity of data increase. Yet there’s no singular, one-size-fits-all framework for secure data storage and management. According to IDC, global data creation and replication will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% by 2025. This means that organizations need access to a range of solutions for storing sensitive data at scale, especially considering mounting regulations that vary by geography and industry. Two well-known examples: GDPR in Europe and HIPAA privacy rules for health information in the U.S.

With data well situated as the lifeblood of organizations and as a core competitive differentiator, data security becomes paramount. The rise in ransomware attacks and other cybersecurity breaches has raised awareness of the issue and made securing the IT estate a top C-suite priority. 

Upgrading IT and data security to reduce corporate risk was the No. 1 CEO priority for respondents to the IDG/Foundry “State of the CIO Study 2022” research, cited by a third of the respondents. Almost half (49%) called out increasing cybersecurity protections as the top business initiative driving IT investments this year, up from 34% in 2021. 

The push for elevated cybersecurity protections is also filtering down into storage and data management requirements. Gartner research shows that 60% of all enterprises will require storage products to have integrated ransomware defense and mitigation mechanisms by 2025, up from 10% in 2022.

As enterprises modernize with cloud, connectivity, and data, they are gravitating to technology-as-a-service models to refashion IT estates. Traditionally these IT ecosystems feature silos spread across multiple environments, including on-premises data centers and colocation facilities at the edge or across diverse cloud platforms. Compounding the complexity: the problem of multigenerational IT and the challenge of establishing resilience and cybersecurity across workloads. This considering the disparity of the environment and due to mounting cybersecurity, regulatory, and privacy challenges. 

Without an overall strategy for modernization, companies risk mismanaging their edge-to-cloud data efforts, either overprovisioning, which incurs unnecessary costs, or underprovisioning, which impedes their ability to fully deliver for customers or hit key business goals. They may also lack on-location staff expertise to design and manage robust cybersecurity protocols. 

“Customers want to be provided with integrated and optimized hardware and software platforms … to make sure there’s no disruption at all in the business,” says Valerie Da Fonseca, worldwide GreenLake and GTM senior director at HPE. “The key here is to shape the right data strategy, so you simplify data management and provide access controls in an as-a-service model.”

Partner Ecosystem at Work

A rich partner ecosystem is essential for delivering next-generation secure data management protection from edge to cloud. HPE GreenLake’s backup-and-recovery services help companies fulfill data protection service-level agreements (SLAs) without having to make upfront capital investments or take on overprovisioning risk. On-demand cloud backup and recovery services ensure resilience at scale and allow for an agile response to changing business needs. Preconfigured on-premises solutions provide extended options, and a rich ecosystem of third-party partners gives customers choice.

The HPE GreenLake data protection portfolio delivers next-generation data protection services, from design and implementation to delivery with no vendor lock-in. The life cycle starts with HPE’s Zerto ransomware protection and disaster recovery services and extends to hybrid cloud data protection with the HPE Backup and Recovery Service. Finally, HPE offers on-premises data protection with HPE StoreOnce, a modernized data management solution for hybrid cloud that simplifies operations and delivers data protection based on common SLAs. Additional backup-and-recovery options from ISV partners such as Veeam, Commvault, and Cohesity complete the picture, ensuring that HPE GreenLake for Data Protection Services provides a breadth of choice to make data backup-and-recovery operations seamless and automated.

“The partner ecosystem delivers a comprehensive, end-to-end suite of services that adds value to HPE’s data protection strategy,” Da Fonseca says. “We are integrating everything into our hardware and HPE GreenLake as-a-service platform, and the solutions can be located everywhere and anywhere and be fully managed if customers don’t have the staff.”

To ensure the right data management/protection mix, HPE works with customers to understand their business needs and IT management challenges, creating a holistic strategy that encompasses the right partners and operating model. That level of comprehensive planning is crucial to safeguarding data and ensuring an end-to-end data management strategy that truly mitigates risk and meets the needs of the business. At the same time, making data protection available as a service streamlines the customer experience, providing time-to-market and cost advantages.

For more information, visit https://www.hpe.com/us/en/solutions/edge-to-cloud.html

Data Management

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , ,

Data represents a store of value and a strategic opportunity for enterprises across all industries. From edge to cloud to core, businesses are producing data in vast quantities, at an unprecedented pace. And they’re now rapidly evolving their data management strategies to efficiently cope with data at scale and seize the advantage. … Or are they?

Well, some are. Those are the data-first organizations, the industry leaders who understand that, amid a flood of data, navigating via data-first principles to radically simplify data management is not only critical to surviving and thriving in the long run, but also essential right now, when advantages in data management can determine a company’s future success.

Let’s look at some real numbers. According to the results of a recent survey of 750 IT professionals from analyst firm ESG, 93% of IT decision-makers see storage and data management complexity impeding digital transformation. However, only 13% of surveyed organizations could be considered data-first leaders. In other words, everyone knows that data management is a major challenge, but very few have been able to turn obstacles into opportunities.

That’s why simplifying data management now is a crucial initiative: There’s plenty of running room to establish future competitiveness and market position. To go deeper, let’s break down the pressing need for a data-first approach in three ways:

1. A data-first strategy is the rocket ship to innovation

Hidden in your data is a new world of possibilities, new customer experiences, and the next wave of applications that will drive tomorrow’s business outcomes. We see evidence of this from numerous perspectives. But right now, that data likely spans edge, cloud, and core, and a good portion of it may be difficult to access and manage due to silos and complexity.

How much complexity? ESG found that, on average, surveyed organizations relied on 23 different data management tools. Picture all that hardware and software, the silos they represent, and the difficulty of using all those tools to manage the lifecycle of data and data infrastructure — including access, protection, governance, and analysis — across an edge-to-cloud environment. It’s overwhelming.

ESG also found that 74% of respondents acknowledged that their data management capabilities can’t keep up with business requirements. That means slow deployments, lots of tuning and maintenance, delays from manual provisioning, and ultimately missed SLAs that affect the entire organization. Without efficiently serving data at speed to your stakeholders, you’re missing opportunities and losing time.

This bears repeating: There’s a real cost to standing pat and doing nothing about data management complexity. Fortunately, there’s also a simple solution: go data-first.

2. To achieve digital transformation, you need simplified data management

Digital transformation is what every modern enterprise seeks, but it’s difficult to imagine successful digital transformation without first solving for data management, which is a core competency of any data-driven organization. The key to simplifying data management is to deliver the cloud operational experience wherever your data lives. In the real world, data and apps are needed everywhere — which is why organizations are moving away from a cloud-first strategy and going data-first. Delivering cloud operations on-premises, at the edge, and in off-premises locations is truly transformational and precisely what a data-first strategy seeks to harness.

In a previous article, we discussed the pathways to simplify data management from edge to cloud and the substantial business benefits to going data-first. To truly power digital transformation, you need to deliver a cloud operational experience for your apps and data wherever they live via these key steps:

Transform faster with infrastructure as-a-service. Leverage a new generation of as-a-service storage and infrastructure offerings for self-service agility and cloud operations across hybrid cloud.Make your apps and infrastructure autonomous with AI. Harness an AIOps engine to streamline IT operations across your environment, enabling delivery of elastically scalable apps and services with the click of a button and without disruptions.Modernize data protection. Move to end-to-end, resilient data protection, including as-a-service hybrid cloud backup and disaster recovery, for flexibility, rapid recovery, and ransomware protection.

3. Start now, and data-first is a race you can win

A data-first strategy means you can move faster than your competition. Data-first yields faster time-to-market, happier stakeholders, and more satisfied consumers. Ultimately, it leads to accelerated business success and — since data-first entails simplified data management and a modern approach to data protection — lower risk.

To illustrate how data-first organizations tend to pull away from the pack, consider this: ESG found that data-first organizations were 20x more likely to beat competitors to market by multiple quarters. At the same time, they were 2x more likely to recover from ransomware attacks within minutes.

With numbers like these, the gap between data-first organizations and everyone else is set to grow substantially, and the sooner you join the first group, the better.

Choose the right technology partner to get you there

The good news? You’re not alone in your journey. HPE GreenLake delivers cloud operations across hybrid cloud through a unified and secure edge-to-cloud platform. With industry-leading infrastructure services, cloud data protection, and data management services, HPE GreenLake helps you jumpstart your journey to data-first modernization.

About Shilpi Srivastava

Shilpi is the Head of Data Services and Storage Marketing at HPE. With experience spanning cloud services, data storage and cyber security, Shilpi is passionate about technologies that help business innovate and succeed. Shilpi previously led cloud and container solutions marketing at Pure Storage and has held Product Marketing and Technical lead positions at Micro Focus and JP Morgan Chase. She has an Bachelor of Engineering degree from India and an MBA from University of Texas at Austin.

Data Management, Digital Transformation, IT Leadership

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , ,

As companies lean into data-first modernization to deliver best-in-class experiences and drive innovation, protecting and managing data at scale become core challenges. Given the diversity of data and range of data-inspired use cases, it’s important to align with a robust partner ecosystem. This can help IT teams map the right set of services to unique workflows and to ensure that data is securely managed and accessible regardless of location.

Data volume has become a challenge for organizations as the size and velocity of data increase. Yet there’s no singular, one-size-fits-all framework for secure data storage and management. According to IDC, global data creation and replication will experience a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 23% by 2025. This means that organizations need access to a range of solutions for storing sensitive data at scale, especially in light of mounting regulations that vary by geography and industry. Two well-known examples: GDPR in Europe and HIPAA privacy rules for health information in the U.S.

With data well situated as the lifeblood of organizations and as a core competitive differentiator, data security becomes paramount. The rise in ransomware attacks and other cybersecurity breaches has raised awareness of the issue and made securing the IT estate a top C-suite priority.

Upgrading IT and data security to reduce corporate risk was the No. 1 CEO priority for respondents to the IDG/Foundry “State of the CIO Study 2022” research, cited by a third of the respondents. Almost half (49%) called out increasing cybersecurity protections as the top business initiative driving IT investments this year, up from 34% in 2021.

The push for elevated cybersecurity protections is also filtering down into storage and data management requirements. Gartner research shows that 60% of all enterprises will require storage products to have integrated ransomware defense and mitigation mechanisms by 2025, up from 10% in 2022.

As enterprises modernize with cloud, connectivity, and data, they are gravitating to technology-as-a-service models to refashion IT estates. Traditionally these IT ecosystems feature silos spread across multiple environments, including on-premises data centers and colocation facilities at the edge or across diverse cloud platforms. Compounding the complexity: the problem of multigenerational IT and the challenge of establishing resilience and cybersecurity across workloads. This in light of the disparity of the environment and due to mounting cybersecurity, regulatory, and privacy challenges.

Without an overall strategy for modernization, companies risk mismanaging their edge-to-cloud data efforts, either overprovisioning, which incurs unnecessary costs, or underprovisioning, which impedes their ability to fully deliver for customers or hit key business goals. They may also lack on-staff expertise to design and manage robust cybersecurity protocols.

“Customers want to be provided with integrated and optimized hardware and software platforms … to make sure there’s no disruption at all in the business,” says Valerie Da Fonseca, worldwide GreenLake and GTM senior director at HPE. “The key here is to shape the right data strategy so you simplify data management and provide access controls in an as-a-service model.”

Partner Ecosystem at Work

A rich partner ecosystem is essential for delivering next-generation secure data management protection from edge to cloud. HPE GreenLake’s backup-and-recovery services help companies fulfill data protection service-level agreements (SLAs) without having to make upfront capital investments or take on overprovisioning risk. On-demand cloud backup and recovery services ensure resilience at scale and allow for an agile response to changing business needs. Preconfigured on-premises solutions provide extended options, and a rich ecosystem of third-party partners gives customers choice.

The HPE GreenLake data protection portfolio delivers next-generation data protection services, from design and implementation to delivery with no vendor lock-in. The life cycle starts with HPE’s Zerto ransomware protection and disaster recovery services and extends to hybrid cloud data protection with the HPE Backup and Recovery Service. Last but not least, HPE offers on-premises data protection with HPE StoreOnce, a modernized data management solution for hybrid cloud that simplifies operations and delivers data protection based on common SLAs. Additional backup-and-recovery options from ISV partners such as Veeam, Commvault, and Cohesity complete the picture, ensuring that HPE GreenLake for Data Protection Services provides a breadth of choice to make data backup-and-recovery operations seamless and automated.

“The partner ecosystem delivers a comprehensive, end-to-end suite of services that adds value to HPE’s data protection strategy,” Da Fonseca says. “We are integrating everything into our hardware and HPE GreenLake as-a-service platform, and the solutions can be located everywhere and anywhere and be fully managed if customers don’t have the staff.”

To ensure the right data management/protection mix, HPE works with customers to understand their business needs and IT management challenges, creating a holistic strategy that encompasses the right partners and operating model. That level of comprehensive planning is crucial to safeguarding data and ensuring an end-to-end data management strategy that truly mitigates risk and meets the needs of the business. At the same time, making data protection available as a service streamlines the customer experience, providing time-to-market and cost advantages.

“It’s really about faster access to the insights that the business needs to make better decisions around innovation and customer experience,” she says. “Having one operating model with all the IT environments connected in the right way means customers don’t have to worry about where data resides. They can get the right benefits and insights out of data without managing it or worrying about compliance and security risks.”

For more information, visit https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake/services.html.

Data Center

Posted on Posted in Digital transformation, General topics Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Whether the goal is elevating customer experiences, promoting operational efficiencies, or delivering new products and services, no one partner or platform can cover all the bases and serve as the central clearinghouse for fueling data insights that drive business success.

To fully capitalize on data-first modernization, organizations need secure access to data spread across the IT landscape. Data is in constant flux, due to exponential growth, varied formats and structure, and the velocity at which it is being generated. Data is also highly distributed across centralized on-premises data warehouses, cloud-based data lakes, and long-standing mission-critical business systems such as for enterprise resource planning (ERP). The breadth and depth of the enterprise data estate only increase management complexity and make it difficult to leverage the data estate’s true value.

Organizations must have seamless visibility and secure access to data wherever it might reside, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Given the current regulatory climate, some data must remain on-premises or be tied to specific systems. This puts the burden on companies to execute an approach that balances the need for frictionless visibility and secure access without infringing on compliance requirements.

That’s where an open platform with a large independent software vendor (ISV) ecosystem holds promise in the world of hybrid, multicloud IT. Access to a rich ISV ecosystem of applications and services can help enterprises unify and extract value from data wherever it resides and throughout its entire life cycle, whether that means delivering secure backup-and-recovery capabilities or serving up analytics capabilities aimed at improving both day-to-day and strategic decision-making. A platform that cultivates an open and active ISV ecosystem gives customers greater choice and flexibility in selecting the tools and services that cater to their specific requirements, making it possible to meet their intended business goals. By creating a collaborative environment, the customer also gains a simpler experience which speeds time to value.

“If you have your data in different tools, based on a private cloud or public cloud, you’re going to run into barriers,” notes Pat Reardon, director, HPE GreenLake ISV ecosystem. “Managing those environments separately is inefficient and creates data silos that make it hard to advance a singular data strategy. One of the benefits of a robust ISV ecosystem is that it’s scalable across hybrid and multicloud and delivers a seamless experience for customers.”

An ISV ecosystem at work

Most foundational IT platforms tout access to an ISV ecosystem, but they are not all the same. Platforms that deliver access to an array of core applications and services that have been vetted and certified to run optimally in that particular environment can eliminate a lot of the guesswork and heavy lifting for IT, making deployment far more seamless.

“Validating a solution eliminates the burden on customers to piecemeal their own approach,” Reardon explains. “They can always be customized, but certifying that these [ISV] solutions are enterprise-grade for what they are trying to accomplish and then standing behind it — that is key.”

Other things to consider when evaluating a platform and related ISV ecosystem:

Simplified customer experience. With core workloads and critical data distributed across a hybrid environment — some in cloud systems, in colocation facilities, and/or on-premises — it’s important to mask complexities to give users a seamless and holistic experience. The HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform delivers the convenience and pay-as-you-go flexibility of the public cloud with the privacy, performance, and control of your own environment — which can span data centers, cloud, and edge for its entire ISV ecosystem. This ensures a cohesive and consistent cloud experience for users, no matter where data resides, while decreasing the time-to-insights required for a data-first advantage.

Access to common workflows. An expansive ISV ecosystem isn’t useful for a data-first business if the supported applications and services don’t address data management and analytics processes, among other critical workflows. HPE GreenLake opens the door to a rich ISV ecosystem that spans data protection, database, storage, mainstream business applications, and core enterprise platforms such as SAP ERP.

For example, on the data protection and disaster recovery front, the HPE GreenLake Marketplace encompasses leading solutions from Veeam, Qumulo, and Commvault, and in the database and analytics category, certified ISV partners include Nutanix, Splunk, and EDB Postgres, among others. There are also capabilities to seamlessly maximize and manage data in SAP ERP. Although the HPE GreenLake Marketplace currently serves up an ISV partner catalog, the plan is to deliver click-to-deploy functionality for all certified ISV solutions, enabling scalability and ease of consumption by directly delivering software without physical deployment of a new stack. “Whether it’s backup or AI, HPE GreenLake addresses common workloads as part of the ecosystem,” Reardon explains. “This helps customers considering the as-a-service model have the confidence that commonly needed workloads will run in a hybrid environment.”

Hardened SLAs and one venue for support. Beyond accessibility, ease of support and simplified service-level agreements (SLAs) are optimal when you’re considering an extensible platform as part of a data-first business strategy. HPE GreenLake enables you to easily deploy resources; view your costs; and forecast capacity, which extends to its certified ISV ecosystem. This ensures that costs are based on the actual usage of the selected services and are delivered to meet specified service-level targets and other relevant metrics. The HPE GreenLake IT ecosystem model also ensures that support services are integrated — another important salvo in reducing silos along with IT complexity. “Not all data can be in the public cloud, but customers want the experience of public cloud, just on their own terms,” Reardon says. “That’s where we come in. We can deliver an alternative means to accomplish the same thing when public cloud isn’t the best answer.”

In the end, the combination of a robust edge-to-cloud platform designed for your top workloads and an integrated ISV ecosystem translates into simplicity and accelerated deployment for customers. The result is that companies are free to tend to the needs of data-first business, not the complexities and challenges of IT.

For more information, visit https://www.hpe.com/us/en/greenlake/services.html.

Data Management