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Enterprises Bring DevOps' Agility to Data Management

By Reza Morakabati, Chief Information Officer at Commvault

Over the next year, enterprises will launch new agile, DevOps-like teams to optimize how they manage and use their data. These teams -- composed of data security, protection, analytics and other types of data exerts along with IT operations staff - will be tasked with quickly and efficiently improving the security, protection, governance, and value of their organization's data. 

DevOps teams like this have a staple of application development for years. Unlike traditional application development, which separated the software development and operations teams, these DevOps teams combine software developers with IT operations staff into a single group focused on application development and improvement. In doing so DevOps teams made it easier for enterprises to implement agile software development methodologies, shortening application development times and speeding the improvement of applications on an ongoing basis.  

However, the past year has demonstrated that while the digital economy might run on applications, many of this economy's most valuable assets are the data collected and generated by these applications. It has also demonstrated that when enterprises do not secure, protect, govern, optimize and analyze this data on an ongoing basis, they not only risk ceding market leadership to those that do, but also put the fundamental integrity of their business at risk.  

For example, criminals are constantly developing new, more sophisticated ransomware attacks that can lock this data, shutting global enterprises down for days or weeks. Government agencies are auditing enterprises' data privacy practices on an ongoing basis, with massive fines (and bad publicity) awaiting those enterprises that are not in compliance with current regulations. Enterprises also find themselves constantly needing to move or migrate data from on-premises to cloud, cloud to cloud, application to application if they hope to optimize operations and costs. Meanwhile, most markets leaders today - ranging from Amazon to Coca-Cola, and Netflix to Marriott) are characterized by their ability to use their data to deliver better experiences to their customers than their competitors.  

Thus the need for enterprises to deploy agile data teams that can quickly and continuously provide them with comprehensive visibility and control of the data they have sprawled across dozens of SaaS applications, multiple cloud services, and various types of on-premises infrastructure. Teams that shorten cycle times for new data solution releases, increasing the frequently of these releases so that the enterprises' other IT and business teams can experiment with them and quickly provide feedback on how well they help the them manage and use data. Teams with the skills and speed needed to secure and protect this data, so they can fend off attacks from cybercriminals while also making sure, if a successful attack or another data disaster does occur, they can quickly and comprehensively recover their data. Teams that can rapidly move data from any application, cloud or infrastructure to any other application, cloud or infrastructure. Teams that will collaborate with work business line employees to use the latest data analytics, AI, ML and other tools to glean valuable insights from this data - insights that these enterprises can use to better forecast product demand next holiday season, predict when a piece of IoT-enabled industrial equipment will need maintenance to prevent downtime, and improve other business outcomes.  

These teams will not just be completing these data management and optimization projects and going back to their old jobs. Enterprises are always adding more applications and generating new data, cybercriminals are always developing new attacks, and customers' expectations are always changing. Which is why the new agile data teams enterprises created in 2022 will last well beyond next year, as enterprises continue to seek to accelerate how quickly cycle through the data environment changes needed to optimize how they store, protect, secure, govern, and use their data in today's dynamic digital economy.  

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

With more than 30 years in the industry, Commvault CIO Reza Morakabati believes that you not only have to have the right strategy, but you must have consistent operations, strong execution, and the ability to scale to differentiate a company. 

He has demonstrated this at Commvault by working with his team to build the organizational structure and operational discipline needed to provide the company with best-in-class IT operations and a scalable business technology framework. 

Prior to joining Commvault, Reza served as Vice President of Business Technology & Operations at Puppet and spent several years in leadership at Pivotal and EMC. Reza, who earned his MBA from MIT Sloan, keeps his entrepreneurial spirit alive by helping small to mid-sized companies advance their operations.