More than half of data-driven initiatives are failing in business, with 27 percent of failures due to a skills shortage according to new research from analytic database company Exasol.

In the public sector, financial services and energy and utilities companies the failure rate rises to more than 60 percent. And in retail and financial services 40 percent blame skills shortages for failures.

In the rapidly-evolving data-hungry IT environment, data center management is becoming increasingly intensive and complex. Team that with the constant pressure to control costs while increasing efficiency and capacity, data center traffic is projected to more than triple by 2020, driven primarily by our dependence to do business, communicate, and entertain over the Internet.

The immense amount of data needed to support these activities requires not only a growing number of data centers, but new kinds of data center builds, which also necessitates new ways to manage them. In addition, green initiatives driven by power concerns and the implications of size and scale, coupled with the adoption of new technologies, are creating a confluence of often conflicting forces that require new and innovative data center management solutions.

The weird thing about evolution is that it affects us even though we are deeply aware of its mechanisms and processes. There's something unavoidable and inexorable about it. While that's true of physical processes governed by natural selection, perhaps it's less true of human culture and technology. Or is it?

Over the long history of IT and its use in and by big business, we've seen constant innovation, sometimes incremental in progress but sometimes radically discontinuous. Consider the steady march of microprocessor performance in the former case and the sudden AI deep learning revolution for the latter. But in both cases what's happened before and what's happening now affect and influence what directions tech goes into tomorrow.

Nearly 40 percent of financial services businesses are failing to implement data initiatives due to a lack of skills, with almost a third saying that their GDPR initiatives are failing, according to a new study.

The report produced by Vanson Bourne for analytics database company Exasol is based on responses from 500 IT and business decision makers, from enterprises in Germany and the UK.

A new study into how enterprises manage sensitive data reveals overconfidence in knowing where private data resides, and the use of inadequate tools such as spreadsheets to track it.

The research from Integris Software shows 40 percent are 'very' or 'extremely' confident in knowing exactly where sensitive data resides, despite only taking inventory once a year or less. Yet a mere 17 percent of respondents are able to access sensitive data across five common data source types.

A new study released by Acronis ahead of Sunday's World Backup Day shows 92.7 percent of consumers are backing up their computers -- an increase of more than 24.1 percent from last year and the largest ever year-on-year increase.

This could be because the report also shows that 65.1 percent of those surveyed say either they or a family member has lost data as a result of an accidental deletion, hardware failure or software problem -- a jump of 29.4 percentage points from last year.

MySpace -- that forerunner of the social networking phenomenon -- appears to have had a bit of an accident. In the process of migrating servers, it seems that the site has managed to lose 12 years' worth of uploaded music and other data.

The slip up means that photos, videos and music uploaded between 2003 and 2015 have been lost forever. This is not a case of data being temporary unavailable; MySpace has lost it, and -- almost unbelievably -- has no backup.

According to new research from data protection specialist Veritas Technologies, employees are losing two hours a day searching for data, and data management challenges are costing businesses as much as $2 million a year.

On the other hand the study of 1,500 IT decision makers across 15 countries, carried out by Vanson Bourne for Veritas, shows organizations that invest in effective day-to-day management of their data have reported cost savings and better employee productivity as a result.

NVIDIA has announced that it plans to buy Israeli chipmaker Mellanox. Fending off competition from Microsoft and Intel, NVIDIA's bid of $6.9 billion was enough to secure the deal which is expected to be finalized by the end of the year.

As part of the agreement, NVIDIA will purchase all Mellanox shares for $125 each in cash. It sees the company expanding further into high-performance computing and supercomputers, and boosts its datacenter business.

The demands of digital transformation inevitably lead to additional stresses on the data center. It's no surprise then that enterprises are increasingly turning to technology solutions to improve their data center management and workload monitoring.

But what can these solutions deliver and how effective are they? We spoke to Jeff Klaus, GM of data center management solutions at Intel, to find out.

Cloud data warehouses (CDW) offer broader data capabilities, stronger performance, and greater flexibility than traditional on-premise databases according to a new survey.

But the study by TDWI on behalf of Talend also shows enterprises need to follow some best practices to overcome implementation challenges and increase investment return.

Data has become an increasingly popular resource for marketers, new research from marketing platform YouAppi reveals that 98 percent of respondents say they have increased their organizational investment in data.

What's more that investment is paying off, 97 percent say they have seen improvement, with more than half of those calling the improvements ‘significant.’

Almost half of respondents to a new survey identify ever-increasing disparate data sources as a major pain point.

The study from development technology specialist Progress also finds 44 percent of respondents are worried about integrating cloud data with on-premises data, making real-time hybrid connectivity critical.

Poor information management processes are making jobs harder for staff and reducing their productivity and effectiveness in the workplace, according to new research from information management specialist M-Files Corporation.

Navigating different systems and locations to find the correct version of a file they are looking for negatively affects productivity according to 82 percent of respondents.

Energy costs are one of the fastest-rising expenses for today’s data centers and the global energy ecosystem as a whole. Not only do energy cost make up 70 to 80 percent of ongoing operational expenses, but data centers are projected to soon amount to the largest share of global electricity production, according to Huawei Technologies’ Total Consumer Power Consumption Forecast.

As new technologies enter the data center realm at an increasing rate, expectations for advanced operational environments capable of meeting energy demands are at odds with an ever-present demand to keep costs down. In fact, studies have shown that cost savings continue to be a main motivating factor when selecting data center management tools. While introducing new processes to data center operations -- like real-time data center monitoring -- is key to modernization at a low cost, researchers have found managers need the pressure of an imminent issue or decision to overhaul legacy tech to make the step towards adopting a data center manager tool.