Although it is hard to be aware of it in the eye of the storm, we are currently undergoing a fourth industrial revolution, centred around data. The last industrial revolution from the 1970’s brought us many of the things that we are familiar with today.  Efficiency improvements in the storage, access and analysis of data is what is fuelling the fourth industrial revolution and includes industry changing technology such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IOT).

Digital data is growing exponentially and is almost to the point where it is doubling year on year with estimates being that it will reach 44 Zettabytes by 2020.  Corporate Storage is on the same race to zero path that consumer storage has followed previously making it easier and cheaper than ever for companies to store vast amounts of data. The challenge therefore becomes how to analyse, search and generate efficiency gains from organisational data. Additionally companies need to have confidence in their ability to identify and manage sensitive unstructured data to prevent legislative breaches, and at worst, large fines.

Extracting maximum value from data held not only improves productivity at an organisational level it enables companies to innovate to differentiate themselves from the competition and gain an edge.

Enterprises often find themselves dealing with multiples of data islands and spend more time dealing with integration and compliance process than extracting value from the data. This is the primary reason we created the Enterprise File Fabric. The vision is that of a hub and spoke in which the File Fabric connects the data islands into a single point for management, enforcement of legislative polices, and a single consolidated place to discover and search corporate data  – think of it as a platform for consolidated data management, data governance, and data search  visualisation that spans on-premises and on-cloud data sets.

One of the things I have learned during the journey since founding Storage Made Easy is that the key barrier for most companies is not how to store data, but where to store it, and how to allow better ‘joined up ‘access to the data that is available. It is also crucial to ensure the right data governance and privacy control policies are in place as this makes  compliance with GDPR and other regulations much easier.

All companies will have legacy on-premises data and increasingly data on-cloud and this hybrid approach will continue for years and as data grows companies will have no option but to address the multi-cloud issues to get data at compliance efficiencies from their digital transformation strategy.