Organizations not effective at getting value from their data

Businesses increasingly understand that staying competitive means making smart use of their data. But a new survey from Syncsort finds that just nine percent of respondents say their organization is 'very effective' at getting value from data while 48 percent responded 'somewhat effective'.

Making data accessible to users across the enterprise is the third most cited IT challenge and only half call their organization effective in getting data insights to business users.

But in spite of this, 'improved access to data' only ranks fourth on the list of business initiatives IT indicated they would support in 2019, behind increased operational/workforce efficiency (48 percent), improved customer experience (46 percent) and cost reduction (42 percent).

Modernizing infrastructure is selected by 38 percent as the highest priority IT initiative for 2019, and is the top technology currently providing business benefits, chosen by 25 percent of respondents.

Cloud and hybrid Computing is the top initiative for 2019, selected by 46 percent, with 39 percent already in early adoption (less than 2 years), 27 percent in production and 10 percent in mature adoption.

Data lakes are not as popular as you might think, with just nine percent in mature adoption (5+ years), while 17 percent are in production (2-4 years), 24 percent in early adoption (less than 2 years) and 23 percent still in the research and evaluation stage.

Most building data lakes are populating them from their enterprise data warehouse (52 percent), with a lower percentage using data from RDBMS (37 percent), NoSQL databases (24 percent), third-party providers (23 percent) and cloud repositories (21 percent).

The data lake use case with the most interest is advanced/predictive analytics (50 percent). This is followed by real-time analytics (42 percent), operational analytics (41 percent), and data discovery and visualization (39 percent).

"There is so much data being produced today, and it's creating a significant number of new opportunities and challenges," says Tendü Yoğurtçu, CTO of Syncsort. "We are seeing cloud and hybrid cloud as the mainstream trends, which is consistent with the results of our 2018 cloud survey. With the gravity of data shifting, organizations are trying to take advantage of the cloud’s elasticity and gain the ability to analyze and deliver trusted data into application pipelines as quickly as possible. These are the precursors to improving data accessibility and taking advantage of the emerging technologies, like machine learning and streaming analytics, that will help deliver more value out of data."

You can find out more in the full report, available from the Syncsort website.

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