Many organizations are pouring time and money into data and analytics initiatives, only to get stuck in the first phase. Others can’t organize their entire data set to generate the insights they need to make smarter decisions and positive business outcomes.
There are many reasons why data initiatives do not live up to their potential business value. between them:
1 – Data silos that obstruct the organization’s vision across the business unit. These silos keep critical data out of the reach of key stakeholders in business and transformational digital initiatives. A survey by IDG/HPE found that companies make use of only about half (49%) of their data sets to derive direct business value; 34% of respondents said they fell short of achieving strategic data goals.
2 – Person restrictions created by the data silo scene. For this reason, analytics users and data scientists spend a significant amount of time trying to locate and integrate the right data, versus interpreting the data to display optimal business insights. Those with the most knowledge about the systems and where the data is are working from their own silos, further hampering insights and undermining desired business outcomes.
“The isolated nature of systems means that we often have people working inside those silos and not communicating with each other, which leads to inefficiencies,” explains Matt Mako, CTO of Global Domain – HPE Ezmeral Software. “We also have technical debts that have accumulated as these systems have matured, which makes the concept of modernizing our analytics and data-gathering systems a very costly proposition.”
3 – Technical debts, which has been accumulated through system updates and integration initiatives over the years. Although this extends the life of the system, it also creates a large amount of custom code and logic, which in turn greatly increases the complexity of the system in general. In addition, many of these workloads and systems are unable to run or adapt to modern cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes, microservices, or devops-like automation. This puts the foundation for data-driven business out of reach. Alternatively, organizations may stand in a modern environment specifically for data analysis teams but end up in another silo that generates additional complexity.
At the same time, many of these legacy systems remain critical to business, both today and for the foreseeable future. “You can only delete these systems if you have something that has the same functionality as it will replace it,” Maccaux says.
Partnership for success
Although some are still stuck, many organizations are seeing what is needed to move forward and maximize the full value of data. According to the IDG/HPE survey, this includes access to better analytics tools and services (cited by 61% of respondents), seamless integration of multiple data sources (46%), and finding a trusted partner with high performance computing expertise (38%).
Having the right partner and platform is key to getting the most miles from your existing data while recalibrating and strengthening your organization with the tools, skills, and talent required to fully implement a data-driven business. A partner like HPE has global experience, proven methodologies, intellectual property rights (IP), and core technology platforms. Taken together, these organizations can help organizations operationalize modern data initiatives while being fully open to and capturing the value of legacy data and systems.
HPE Partnership can help launch stalled data initiatives by providing the following:
Access to specialized talent. Successful data initiatives require diverse talents, from technologists trained in legacy data warehouse and reporting capabilities to experts in newer fields such as artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), AIops, cloud services, devops, and containers. Many of these skills, particularly artificial intelligence/machine learning, AIops, and data science competencies that are critical to recent data initiatives, have been in short supply and are now out of reach, due to challenges related to the global pandemic and ongoing workforce trends, including The great resignation.
“There is turmoil everywhere,” says Mako.
HPE and HPE Pointnext experts can be deployed to cover any of these competency gaps. They can also augment an IT organization in order to shift the focus away from operational tasks and data management and instead derive business value with data.
Bringing the cloud experience to data. Many companies simply lack the infrastructure and resources to adopt modern data structures and do not see the public cloud as a viable option for all workloads. HPE GreenLake’s edge-to-cloud platform delivers the same speed, agility, and benefits as a service that are popularized by public cloud platforms wherever applications and data reside, whether on the edge, in a shared facility, or in a data center. HPE Ezmeral MLops, served as cloud services through the edge-to-cloud HPE GreenLake platform, provides a containerized Kubernetes platform for deploying cloud-native and cloud-native applications along with services for data management, data warehousing, data analytics, MLops, and high-performance computing/AI .
Support for an open, extensible environment. Every company is different, and has different modernization requirements and goals for data-driven businesses. HPE GreenLake’s edge-to-cloud platform is part of a larger ecosystem of HPE and partner technologies, meaning organizations can quickly access and purchase the services they need and not be bogged down by a single vendor environment. “HPE software uses 100% open source with open APIs, so companies can get their data in and out and not be restricted,” says Maccaux.
Managed Services Delivery. For companies that lack IT resources or simply want to unload IT from day-to-day operational responsibilities, HPE GreenLake Management Services unload the heavy burden of running modern IT, when and where you need it. Powered by IP and unique automation, HPE GreenLake Management Services delivers comprehensive monitoring, operations, management, and improvement across all areas of IT, freeing the internal organization to focus on innovation.
There is no easy way to flip the switch and turn data into insights. But with the right partner and tools in place, organizations can move forward with data-driven business at a pace that better aligns with their culture and business goals.
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