CIO opinion
“
DATA IS NOW
A CURRENCY,
BUT ONE WHICH
CARRIES EXTRA
RESPONSIBILITY
FOR THE HOLDER.
and maintain GDPR compliance. The right
cultural approaches need to be led by senior
management and the right tools need to be
implemented to support that behaviour. IT
can help but it has to be part of an end-
to-end approach, starting with the data
architect and permeating the organisation
from the back office through to every
customer facing representative.
Leveraging AI and Machine Learning
Data from Forrester suggests that 70% of
enterprises expect to implement some form
of AI over the next year. However, I believe
that, across the full range of businesses,
the benefits of Machine Learning (ML)
are going to be felt more immediately.
ML’s quick wins will be lower down in
the business technology stack. ML based
automation is already proven to save hours
each day in the routine administration of
IT infrastructure. Instrumenting systems,
via the Internet of Things, and using ML
to analyse the data, delivers valuable,
actionable information which can be used
to automatically resolve issues before they
have a business impact.
In my discussions with customers, several
have equated the automation and guidance
provided by ML based systems with having
an additional infrastructure engineer on staff
46
INTELLIGENTCIO
24/7. This frees up IT staff to invest time in
making use of the data they are storing and
securing for their organisations.
Storage conversations should
become data conversations
Technically, and commercially, the problem
of delivering high performance, robust,
simple and scalable storage has been solved.
2018 will be seen as a tipping point, where
automation and orchestration technologies
abstract modern infrastructure technology
“
BEING ABLE TO
EFFICIENTLY
MIGRATE AND
REPATRIATE DATA
IS GOING TO BE
A KEY FEATURE
OF CLOUD
CAPABILITY.
operations into a REST API call from Ansible,
Chef, Puppet, Kubernetes etc.
Developers can now be given access to
the block, file and object storage that they
need, on a common scalable platform,
with certainty over performance and
on-going, non-disruptive enhancement of
the underlying technology. They no longer
need to have discussions about where the
next terabyte is coming from, or how it will
be delivered. The simplification of data
management that this offers opens up the
opportunity for data scientists, researchers
and designers to focus on their data
pipelines and enhancing design processes,
rather than talking about infrastructure.
Being able to shift data and workloads
between clouds to take advantage of multi-
cloud and hybrid architectures as cloud
usage and the data regulation landscape
evolves, is going to become a key capability
for IT teams. In parallel, getting data storage
infrastructure and dataflow right will be
essential to equip organisations to take
advantage of the machine learning and AI
technologies that leading businesses are
already deploying. As we head in to 2018,
the onus is on CIOs and CTOs to ensure that
their data storage strategy and infrastructure
allows the organisation to extract maximum
value from their data. n
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