ESG Videos

Hello. My name is Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst for data protection at ESG. Today I will cover the key findings of recent research on the evolution from data backup to data intelligence. Our objective was to understand the drivers and obstacles with regard to the consideration of data management-like capabilities. This allowed us to identify features, data reuse or data management use cases, current and future adoption trends, and buying differentiators.

We specifically zoomed in on identifying IT professionals' understanding of, and sentiment toward data management. Let's briefly review our findings. There's a lot more behind each of these. The term "data management" means different things to different people. This is not only leading to confusion today, but may perpetuate confusion moving forward.

It is therefore key that vendors and end users come to an agreement on what this all means. Here at ESG we believe a better term or category is "intelligent data management,"which is based on reusing data for business outcomes with an understanding of the context of the data, for example, who created it, where it comes from, etc., and the content, what the actual data is.

Think personal information. Data is increasingly vital to businesses, although silos can have a negative impact on the ability to extract incremental value. Organizations that want to use or reuse data need to adapt their structure, their processes, and their people to reap the most benefit from data assets. We also identified that pervasive data classification processes translate into more positive business and security or compliance outcomes.

Understanding and classifying data is, in our view, a critical step to meet stringent compliance and security mandates including privacy compliance, and to reuse it while minimizing privacy breach risk, for example. Here's some great news. Data reuse generates broad business benefits. Our research highlighted the main areas in which organizations that implement secondary data reuse or intelligent data management, as we like to call it, can benefit.

We believe that data reuse is critical to lower business risk and to foster business growth and expansion. Cloud. Cloud will play an increasingly important role in data intelligence, which is not that surprising after all, given the significant advances and services cloud providers offer today. Based on our research, cloud tops the list of intelligent data management topologies.

This being said, most organizations don't currently leverage public cloud for secondary data beyond data protection. Operational capabilities of data reuse are being underutilized. For example, our research demonstrates that secondary data access from production storage is possible, but actual usage is limited. And here's very big news for the data protection space. Most IT professionals perceive intelligent data management or data reuse as the next stage of data protection, and more than one-third view data reuse as a top five data protection investment priority.

To our vendor friends, it's time to be working on your roadmaps, or marketing campaigns for some of you. I know it's a lot to absorb. It's simply because we're at the cusp of a major market change. That's what we see here at ESG. That's what we hear from IT professionals, and that's what we see vendors responding to.

It might take some time, but remember, business does not wait. If you want to know more about our research, please get in touch. Thank you for your time.