Protecting Your Data – how much is it really worth?

Data is everywhere. Our industry, famous for creating the most enduring buzz words in history (“cloud” anyone?), still spends more time talking about data than pretty much anything else except for security. Why is that?

Data is the lifeblood of the Information Technology industry. Everything we do is designed to generate, manipulate, curate, propagate and elevate data. Yet when it comes to protecting data – I would suggest we don’t always understand just how important this is to the businesses we serve.

To put a fresh spin on this, consider the following statement from a survey completed almost 5 years ago:

“Among our respondents, 63% consider that the monetisation of data could eventually become as valuable to their organisations as their existing products and services.” — CapGemini EMC Big Data Report.

I would suspect that if this survey was done today – the number would be up in the 90% – 95% range. Gartner have a great model for valuing data in an organisation and what it means to the business. The Business Value of Information, or BVI, is a model that uses four key attributes to value date in an organisation. These are:

• Relevance;
• Validity;
• Completeness; and
• Timeliness.

You can find out more about this by reading the full article from Gartner here.

I want to challenge business leaders to evaluate the cost of a comprehensive data protection strategy based on the true value of what they are protecting. I would suggest that the Board of any organisation would be interested in knowing that the most valuable asset of their organisation is appropriately and securely protected and readily accessible in the event of any form of outage or attack.

Thankfully, in the multi-cloud, there has never been a better time to implement a cost-effective and powerful data protection strategy that supports all four of the attributes that Gartner considers important when valuing data.

Data^#3, in partnership with Dell Technologies, can help you develop a customised data protection strategy that meets the specific outcomes your business is trying to achieve. We start from the business need and work back from there to the right set of solutions. By using best-of-breed software and hardware, our solutions can span the broadest ecosystem of applications across the widest range of cloud platforms – meaning we are confident that the right strategy for you can be put in place with ease.

Why not check out some DELL EMC customer stories that explain how organisations have implemented great data protection solutions to deliver real business value.

If you want to learn more, or have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn.