Building business resiliency in 2021 with data for uncertain times

By Mark Micallef, VP of Asia Pacific and Japan, Cloudera

Source: Cloudera. Micallef.

COVID-19 has brought with it an ongoing uncertainty and constant change. To effectively address disruptions and pivot to the new normal, organisations need to look towards enhancing their business resiliency. 

As we prepare for the coming year, organisations not only have to maintain continuous business operations but also be agile to adapt to changes flexibly and at speed.

Meeting those requirements calls for organisations to have an effective data strategy that enables them to make insight-driven decisions quickly. However, research commissioned by Cloudera has found that only 35% of executives from organisations globally think their current data strategy is sufficient. The top three barriers to maximising data for strategy gain are:

• lack of analytical expertise,

• data silos, and

• organisational silos across the enterprise

Given these challenges, how should organisations ensure their data strategy empowers them to become more resilient in 2021?

Support “business as usual”

Many organisations are leveraging cloud storage and services to enable their employees to remain connected and collaborate effectively as remote working becomes the norm. The downside of this move is that it causes data to be stored in multiple locations – potentially compromising data security and governance, while increasing the potential attack surface for cyber attackers. For example, a company could retain sensitive records that fall under compliance scope in the private cloud, while running proof-of-concept applications using anonymised datasets in the public cloud.

Such hybrid and multicloud architectures are expected to be adopted by more than 90% of enterprises in the Asia Pacific (excluding Japan) region by 2021. This move is set to provide greater control for organisations, but can also result in data silos that hinder data accessibility and the ability to ingest data fast enough to make decisions in real time.

Therefore, organisations should ensure their data strategy works in a hybrid multicloud environment. By enabling employees to securely access, analyse and experiment with data regardless of where it resides, organisations can quickly respond to changing market dynamics and minimise the impact of disruptions to the business.

Help establish trust

Before the pandemic, remote working for long periods of time was not a norm commonly practiced by most organisations. Until the right tools are employed to securely address the surge in the new way of work, businesses are at risk of exposing the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their data assets to cyber attackers.

Furthermore, the sudden onset of remote working has also contributed to the growing range and complexity of regulatory requirements surrounding data movement and privacy, as data is spread across different IT environments and even across borders. Our research revealed that 57% of respondents expect to face new data privacy regulations in the near future.

Data security and governance are vital to establishing trust, more so as we embark on an increasingly digital-reliant future. An effective data strategy should enable organisations to trace the source of information, maintain data integrity, and preserve all related metadata. This calls for a consistent set of security and governance policies to be enforced across hybrid multicloud environments – including fine-grained access controls, data lineage, and audit logs.

Enable businesses to pivot to the new normal

Although the experience of the past can help companies better prepare for future challenges, it does not provide a blueprint for action. This is especially so as the pandemic has changed customers’ expectations and the way we work, and has shifted us into an unprecedented future.

Organisations that will thrive in the new normal are those that can make insight-driven decisions to reshape the business as required. Realising this, the research found that half of the companies surveyed plan on using more advanced analytics – such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) – to fully extract the business value embedded in data. For instance, advanced analytics can enable businesses to forecast and anticipate customer demand changes almost in real time through a combination of predictive and prescriptive analytics, scenario simulation, and early-warning detections.

As such, an effective data strategy must support multiple analytical frameworks – from real-time analytics at the edge to process data locally, enabling faster reaction times for organisations, to AI, calculating and making adjustments where necessary and providing reliable insights across all layers of the business. Empowering everyone in the organisation to develop the best intelligence this way will enable businesses to better adapt to changes.

Give data the freedom of choice

With disruptions expected to continue in the future, organisations will need the ability to tap on both new and existing data sources. They may be required to move data across cloud platforms or use multiple cloud platforms at the same time. To achieve this and avoid vendor lock-in, they should take an open source approach to data strategy.

Supporting open compute architecture, open data stores, and open integration enables organisations to treat cloud as infrastructure instead of data architecture. It will allow them to select the right cloud compute and storage resources for their datasets, which also helps better manage their cloud costs. Moreover, the open-source ecosystem partnerships can help organisations take advantage of the rapid pace of open source community innovation.

Leverage enterprise data cloud for resiliency

Although organisations will take different approaches to become data-driven and enhance business resiliency, an enterprise data cloud can help support that journey. With an enterprise data cloud, businesses will be able to apply a wide range of data analytics techniques from the edge to AI in a secure, governed and consistent manner across their choice of IT environments.

In Singapore, United Overseas Bank (UOB) built a modern data platform on Cloudera that gives it the flexibility and speed to develop new AI and machine learning solutions, and to create a data-driven enterprise. This gives their business teams and data scientists faster access to relevant and quality data for self-service analytics, machine learning, and emerging AI solutions. The result is much more cost-effective data analytics capabilities and performance for the bank.

Since avoiding volatility and uncertainty is not an option, it is imperative for companies to build greater business resiliency to thrive. Having a data strategy backed by an enterprise data cloud can help. It will enable organisations to view their data sets and consistently manage data governance and security from a single platform. It will also allow various analytic disciplines to be applied against data regardless of where it resides (i.e. public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud, or on-premise), empowering the business to become insights-driven. Equipped with all these capabilities, they will be in a good position to sustain operations while rearchitecting the business for the future.