The point of data is insight, and the point of insight is progress: lower costs, higher margins, more delighted customers, and in some cases, life-saving responses to emergent threats. What distinguishes a good data strategy from a bad data strategy is, to a first approximation, time to insight. How long does it take an enterprise to get to the right answer, strategy, or policy derived from data analysis? How responsive can the enterprise be to emergent threats, disruptions, or opportunities?
Because data is the lifeblood of the modern enterprise, it is, at worst, the second most strategic asset of every enterprise; arguably even more important than human capital. To date, modern data strategy has focused mainly on data volume, data velocity, and, to a much lesser degree, on data variety. But we’re now in a hybrid, multi-cloud era where the proliferation of data environments — that is, growth in the sheer number of public and private clouds — is the new, fierce driver of complexity. In the hybrid multi-cloud world, data management strategy is increasingly indistinguishable from enterprise growth strategy itself. While the Big Three — AWS, Azure, GCP — are absolutely critical to the functioning of this new world, it’s my contention that a full solution to the unique challenges of hybrid, multi-cloud data strategy will have to come from outside the Big Three.
Read the rest of the article by CEO Kendall Clark on Analytics Insight.