Data visibility facilitates better, faster decisions to support your digital transformation strategy and goals
We live in a world inundated with data. For organisations with even a modest IT estate, the growth in the volume of data gathered from their systems, processes, customers and products has grown exponentially in recent years. Historically, IT data has been siloed because of separated, disparate systems and data generation and collection mechanisms. As such, the relationships and interdependencies of data within these segregated environments have been hidden at worst, and opaque or obscured at best.
With the growth of public cloud and the associated services it provides, the ability to break down silo walls and intermix datasets is greater than ever. Organisations are embracing these opportunities. However, with new operating models comes an even greater influx of data generated by new systems and services.
While it may have been the situation years ago that IT data was not robust and rich enough to fully support the needs of different stakeholders within an organisation, such as CFOs, CIOs, business unit leads, product leads, that’s no longer the case. We’re in a new era, where these stakeholders will have all the data they need to make better business decisions – and to make them faster. We’re now able to extract meaningful and insightful data from areas that were previously impossible or at least extremely difficult – complete asset discovery across hybrid environments and full visibility of all resources across the entire IT estate are now viable.
Curate, calibrate, and enable
The challenge now is to curate and calibrate this huge volume of data to enable IT leaders to be more agile and make better decisions faster. The ability to collect data on all aspects of an IT estate also means that we must now address important questions. How much data is too much? The answer is debatable. Is all this data relevant? Probably not.
For greater insights into your own hybrid IT environment, from on-premises to SaaS to cloud, visit IT Visibility | Flexera
by Brian Adler, Sr. Director Cloud Market Strategy, Flexera
In data analytics, while the quantity of data matters for the law of large numbers to kick in and make our findings statistically significant, the quality of the data is paramount. As the following figure from the Flexera 2021 State of Tech Spend Report shows, the top challenge IT professionals mentioned with regard to making forward-looking decisions was the lack of quality data. Note that they did not say there wasn’t enough data, but a lack of data in which they had confidence.