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Data analytics is an indispensable modern business tool. Data understanding and its analytics provide comprehensive answers to the business on how to set up processes for maximum benefit, who is the main business customer and what he needs, what «gaps» exist in activities. In addition, companies use artificial intelligence to offer products and services to the «right» people. The ability to increase business processes efficiency is provided by robots and automation.

All these developments are based on an ever-increasing stream of data that is collected, stored and analyzed. Using data, some companies have revolutionized new services to improve and simplify human life: search engines, communications, e-commerce, booking systems and more.

However, most of the companies did not achieve such success. The reason is that companies  struggle to manage their data and most of it is not used. Accordingly, monetization does not occur.

The first block in data management is storage. An incorrect strategy to overcome this task, or its complete absence, may lead to other problems in the future. Data volume is constantly growing, so companies need to clearly understand what data is important.

At the moment, cloud services offer to store almost unlimited information amounts. However, there are certain difficulties here. For example, data with a high level of confidentiality or regulatory burden cannot be hosted outside the enterprise; some data requires instant access from anywhere in the world; some data requires routine archiving. Also, there is a need for data auditing to determine data relevance and compliance with international regulations. To perform these functions smoothly, it’s necessary to know where the data is located, how many copies exist, and how to access it.

The process of obtaining reliable data can be achieved with fast and highly available storage systems. Modern business analytics involves moving and sorting large data amounts to provide business users and customers with flexible functionality. Including the system must be supported by encryption and security.

Intelligent data warehouse

To achieve maximum speed, stability and security, modern storage systems, including the IBM FlashSystem, use solid-state non-volatile media. Artificial intelligence technologies usage enables intelligent management of data storage and access, which can increase speed and minimize the likelihood of errors and data loss. So, the data with the most frequent predictable access will be ready for work and will be queued.

One of the key requirements for a storage system is resilience. The goal of many businesses today is to build analytics-driven internal processes and customer relationships. In such model, it is impossible to allow these processes to stop as a result of problems with the data flow or infrastructure. Modern storage systems offer the ability to quickly copy and replicate corporate data. Ensuring data integrity is often critical. In this case, 2 or more identical copies of data can be synchronized in different places, and in a situation of an unforeseen failure, it can be restored with practically no data loss.

Rapidly changing data management

The UK Met Office has tackled the challenge of implementing the infrastructure needed to handle rapidly changing data. The information is used to determine weather changes, climate research, and seasonal trends. To do this, 300 million weather-related data points are collected, analyzed daily, and made available to customers. This happens twice to eliminate the risk of interrupting the data flow.

To support this process, a hybrid cloud strategy was developed based on the IBM FlashSystem. The storage provides a high level of compression, which is a cost-effective solution. It also contributes to the creation of a high-performance data infrastructure, which is necessary to transfer information from internal servers to the public cloud and clients.

Another example is the Archdiocese of Salzburg, which needed a solution to provide services more efficiently (support, outreach to the community and parishioners, access to many historical documents and literature). The Archdiocese was able to increase response times 10 to 20 times by moving away from mechanical disk storage in favor of solid-state, non-volatile systems.

Data is an important part of business assets. All data decisions must be smart and effective. The storage process should be considered as a key element of the data management strategy, along with the collection and analytics processes.