Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
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.