Data is the new oil is now an old adage. But what is important is making meaningful conversations and analysis from the data collected as the amount of data generated will grow multi-fold in a very short span of time, thanks to COVID that has pushed every industry to go digital at once. As per a report by Seagate, enterprise data will increase at a 42.2 percent annual growth rate over the next two years, while India will experience the growth at 45.2 percent. This growth is driven by the increased use of analytics, IoT devices and cloud migration.

Despite being a goldmine, enterprises put only 32 percent of the available data to use, while the remaining stays under the carpet. So what keeps data far from use? According to Seagate’s Rethink Data Report, the top five barriers to putting data to work are making collected data usable (39 percent), managing the storage of collected data (37 percent), ensuring that needed data is collected (36 percent), ensuring the security of collected data (35 percent) and making the different silos of collected data available (30 percent).

Hence to bridge the gap between data creators and data

consumers, DataOps is gaining momentum. However, only 10 percent of organizations report having implemented DataOps fully in the Seagate report. But on the other hand, the expansion of data across multiple locations, from cloud to edge, is giving rise to data sprawl, and hence managing data in multicloud and hybrid cloud environment are the top data management challenges expected by enterprises in the next two years.

However, one should not forget the key element of data management. Around two-thirds of survey respondents report their data security is insufficient, making security an essential element of any discussion of efficient data management. When it comes to India, only two percent of respondents indicated that they are not satisfied with their companies’ overall approach for data management, while 74 percent respondents believe that there is much room for improvement and vast room for improvement in their organization’s data management. This is much higher than the global average of 46.7 percent.

What remains the top three use areas of data analytics for Indian respondents are improving data and application availability (33 percent), identifying and exploiting new revenue opportunities (33 percent) and improving customer experience (32 percent). Almost 31 percent of the Indian respondents indicated that the enterprises use data analytics to identify ways to reduce cost, higher than the global average of 26.9 percent.

India is moving in the right direction as many enterprises will see a rise in the use of data to streamline their business operations and customer retention. The country will also have the highest proportion of their data management functions fully automated in two years (74.4 percent) with the US trailing right behind (73.9 percent).