Turning data into a competitive advantage was already a top priority for CEOs everywhere, but the global pandemic has raised the stakes by making instant access to large volumes of data a critical path to business success. Actifio, the pioneer of multi-cloud copy data management software, designed and honed its platform for precisely this kind of urgency.
Ash Ashutosh, Actifio CEO and Co-Founder, said, “We used to worry about the digital divide — those who have access to the internet and those who don’t. Today, it’s the data divide — the divide between organizations that know how to leverage and exploit their data and accelerate the business, and those that don’t. This year, that divide has had a major effect. Data is the new infrastructure, and more and more of our customers are on the right side of the digital divide.”
This is reinforced by IDC analyst Archana Venkatraman’s newly published guest blog, sponsored by Actifio and titled, “Innovate with Data in the Next Normal: Leveraging cloud data management platforms for data protection, availability, and re-use. With IDC estimating the amount of data created over the next three years to exceed the amount created over the last 30 years, “Maximizing the value of data is a foundational aspect of achieving a data-driven organization,” the analyst asserts. “Today, there is a laser-sharp focus on value and cost optimization. As a result, enterprises need to pivot from traditional backup environments that are seen as necessary, single-use, static business procedures to a new paradigm of backup as a dynamic data hub that can provide any data, any number of times, for any business purpose – DevOps, analytics, testing, simulation, machine learning, or app development.”
Ashutosh continued, “I think this is a phenomenal time for companies to absolutely go change, make this transformation about data acceleration, data leverage, data exploitation. And this idea of making data the new infrastructure, it’s finally come to fruition. Most of our customer base relies on Actifio for secure backup and then re-uses the backup data for things that accelerate the business, make the business move faster and more productively.”
“Backup cannot be an insurance or a destination,” Ashutosh said. “It has to be something that you can use as an asset. For us, being the world’s fastest backup and most scalable DR solution is a starting point. It really pays off when customers can use that to develop applications 8-10 times faster, to run analytics 100 times faster. The more data you have, the more people who use the data you have, the better this return becomes.”
In her report, Venkatraman describes IT organizations’ urgency: “In conversations with IDC, IT teams insist that live data availability, data reuse, and data cost optimization are moving from nice-to-have to must-have capabilities for their businesses. But many businesses were caught by the pandemic with legacy data management architectures that were neither cloud connected or automated. These architectures hindered quick access to data, becoming bottlenecks that slowed business decisions. At some organizations, refreshing a large database environment could take as many as three days. This needs to change.”
Actifio’s patented Virtual Data Pipeline (VDP) technology turns data silos into data pipelines, with automation from on-premises to any cloud for secure, instant access for business use.
Image licensed by Pixabay.com
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