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Digital Transformation: Cloud is the technology that will have the single-biggest impact on organisations this year.
That’s according to research experts Gartner who surveyed IT professionals from many job categories and technology disciplines worldwide. The survey identified that Cloud, data and analytics lead the list.
Indeed, according to market intelligence firm IDC, digital transformation will drive “everything that matters in IT” over the next several years.
It added that the “disruptive impact of digital transformation is about to be felt in every industry.”
So why are Cloud, Data and Analytics forecast to have the biggest impact?
Cloud
There are many reasons why more and more organisations are choosing to move their storage to the Cloud. But, we like to think of the three main reasons as the 3 Cs- capacity, cost and collaboration.
Capacity– storing your information on premise will ultimately mean you run out of space. Especially if your organisation is generating huge amounts of data on a daily, monthly or yearly basis. The Cloud offers almost unlimited storage scalability, allowing you to archive vast (and we mean vast) amounts of information. This gives organisations confidence in the ability to turn off legacy data sources.
Cost– Not all information is required to be stored on premise. Increasingly, organisations are discovering the benefits of archiving certain data to the Cloud. This means that storage costs are appropriate to the value of the data and how useful or relevant it is- with a significant cost reduction.
Collaboration– Cloud storage allows you to access documents at any time and from any location. This gives you greater flexibility and of course, the ability to collaborate with colleagues who can also access this useful data as and when required.
Data
The size, and the number of data sources, is on the rise. We’ve seen a huge surge in the amount of content- emails, videos, photographs, messages. In fact, more data has been created in the past two years than ever before in history. The amount of data we are now generating means that much of a business’ unstructured data is considered out of control. As such, it is very difficult for organisations to know what exactly this data is, and, what it contains. This will only become more difficult as data grows.
Analytics
With so much data, organisations are increasingly turning to data profiling. Analytics tools can help them understand what it is they are storing and in turn, if it is truly required. Analytics identify information which is relevant, required by corporate/regulatory policy, inaccessible, duplicated and redundant. This identifies not only the potential to save huge amounts of money and storage, but increase information governance and productivity.
