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Data is the new oil and data sprawl is the new oil spill

The term data sprawl essentially means the pandora’s box holding all your data is about to burst open, sending your precious data careening all over with no means of managing it.

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DQINDIA Online
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data center industry

Today's enterprise is a hybrid landscape of data, with presence across environments, at the edge, such as on-premises, in SaaS applications, and in multiple public and private clouds. Much of this explosive shift points to edge computing and IoT. There were an estimated 11.7 billion IoT device connections at the end of 2020 and Gartner predicts more than 15 billion IoT devices will connect to the enterprise infrastructure by 2029. As IoT devices become omnipresent and more intelligent, they add greater complexity to the data landscape, as enterprises scramble to integrate the data produced into their operational systems or analytics.

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This causes a phenomenon, termed “data sprawl”, which essentially means the pandora’s box holding all your data is about to burst open, sending your precious data careening all over with no means of managing it. Too often projects have been compromised by external threats, human error, or an outage event pausing innovation and tarnishing reputations because the data was stored in fragments.

What can IT organizations and CIOs do to prevent the unprecedented sprawl?

In With the New, Vouch for the Old

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Data and workload sprawl is a daily challenge for IT leaders today. Not only is it difficult to monitor and control data stored on many disparate systems, but it also makes it strenuous to quickly and accurately retrieve the information needed resulting in a loss of productivity. That is why managing this sprawl before it wreaks havoc is important. Intelligent data services can guarantee that the pedal is to the metal on innovation while simultaneously ensuring workloads are properly protected, secured, and made recoverable across the lifecycle.

Organizations should develop a robust data strategy that can be applied across industries and levels of data maturity. Left unchecked, an organization’s unstructured data can saddle them with incompatible data silos, inconsistent data sets, and data quality problems that hinder their ability to run their business efficiently and lead to hidden costs and limited options.

This calls for a solution that allows businesses to fluidly transform with the constantly changing tech and business environments without any worries of multigenerational sprawl. Customers need an integrated and interoperable platform that reduces all complexities in the IT environment, helping them regain control over their data. With a little evaluation and planning, it is an aspect of your operations that can be ameliorated as per requirements and will pay off long term.

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Data Readiness is Important for Data Resilience

The ongoing digital transformation trajectory for enterprises has brought forth augmented solutions and customizable technology to find the magic sauce that’ll set them apart from the rest. This has resulted in the creation of exponentially fragmented and siloed IT infrastructures. Unprotected workload and data sprawl can slow your organization down. In the multi-generational workload and data sprawl world, providing coverage to all workloads in paramount. The more workloads you can cover with great technology, the more relevance that solution and strategy have in your innovation and multi-cloud journey—helping you manage both the sprawl and the workloads.

Regardless of volume, poorly defined or inconsistent data is useless to generate high-quality insights. To be completely data-ready, organizations need to be supporting multi-cloud workloads, Kubernetes, and new SaaS apps with the ease of on-premises files and virtual machines. But the constant transformations and innovations happening widens the gap between the pace of innovation and the risks of trying to transform without the right tools and strategies.

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Closing this gap becomes imperative and this is where intelligent data services come to play.

No Workload Left Behind

Application silos; poor integration; lack of master data; poor quality sources/ingestion processes; limited control over underlying databases; and supplication processes are some of the pressing issues faced by IT professionals hindering the unrestricted use of data. Each of the workloads, applications, data types and infrastructures we all use today offer the ability to provide smart and intuitive integration to ensure the most simplified and efficient management and execution on our systems.

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By reducing complexity in the IT environment, businesses have more room to be as flexible as they want with their data. This enables easier, more effective data management—making data an asset instead of a problem. With intelligent data services, businesses can receive a broad spectrum of protection that spans all kinds of workloads in a sophisticated yet elegant way, ensuring that the IT infrastructure is not creaking at the foundation from the extra burden.

When organizations have the option to secure and manage all their data under one roof, no matter where the workload or data lives it enables them to track it throughout its life and determine how to manage it before challenges arise.

By Pradeep Seshadri, Director, Sales Engineering, Commvault India and SAARC

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