Current data strategies are ineffective, study shows

Photo by Chris Liverani

Just a little over one-third (35%) of organisations believe that their current analytics and data management capabilities are sufficient in meeting business objectives, even as more than two-thirds (69%) recognise a comprehensive data strategy as a requirement for doing so.

This is a key insight from a study done by Cloudera and Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, which polled 150 global business executives representing a wide range of industries, with almost half being organisations with at least $1 billion in revenue.

“This report reveals specific obstacles modern enterprises must overcome to realise the true potential of their data and validates the need for a new approach to enterprise data strategy,” said Arun Murthy, chief product officer of Cloudera.

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Over half (54%) of the organisations surveyed have plans to increase the amount of data they store in the public cloud over the next year, but the majority still manage much of their data on-premises.

As enterprises create cloud strategies that are customised to their needs, the ability to securely access data no matter where it resides and to seamlessly migrate workloads has never been more imperative.

Most organisations are leveraging their data to support traditional functions like business intelligence (80%) and data warehousing (70%). Newer functions are less common but on the rise, with half of the organisations surveyed planning to implement artificial intelligence and machine learning in the next three years.

To fully extract the business value embedded in data, an enterprise data strategy must support a full buffet of functions, from real-time analytics at the Edge to artificial intelligence.

The introduction of new regulations and increasingly complex processes around governance means that every single person in an organisation must understand the importance of keeping data secure and compliant. 

One-tenth of those surveyed did not know if they were required to secure data within a regulatory framework or not, which is a small ignorance that could result in serious risk.