Can you imagine how scary it would be to show up to work one day, ready to dominate, and then BAM! All your confidential files have been stolen, and your computer is now a breeding ground for cyber viruses.

How about if you just launched a new product, which you’ve been advertising for months, and suddenly your website is down, and customers are being redirected to a competitor’s site? Or worse -- you can’t access your online banking account anymore.

During the pandemic, companies with a strong understanding of their business as a whole, including employees, partners, customers and even suppliers, fared better than those without the ability to review and use data to drive growth.

History has shown that the greatest weapon against uncertainty is information. Understanding your business at a microscopic and holistic level is now more important than ever, as the threat of a recession looms. This means that information must be treated as a central tool in leading all businesses through any potential storm.

Businesses are starting to recognize the advantages of leveraging data-driven approaches to improve customer experience. These approaches are also hugely valuable when included in strategic roadmaps to increase engagement and return on investment.

Analytical data is ideal for businesses wanting to assess the needs of their target customers to deliver personalized experiences and attain more accurate forecasting and demand planning. Moreover, data from analytics promotes more effective inventory and supply chain management, compounding supply and fulfillment issues businesses are currently experiencing

Data has become increasingly important for modern businesses and they increasingly expect it to help them improve their delivery to customers and ultimately their bottom line.

We spoke to Dom Couldwell, head of field engineering, EMEA at DataStax to discuss how companies can use data and how they need to adapt their approach to do so effectively.

According to a new study more than 50 percent of enterprises are managing 5PB or more of data, compared with less than 40 percent that were doing so in the same survey last year.

The 2022 Unstructured Data Management Report from Komprise also shows most are now spending more than 30 percent of their IT budget on storage and backups.

Data-mature enterprises see a three times improvement in revenue along with shorter time to market, greater profit, improved operational efficiency and great customer loyalty, according to a new report.

The study from IDC and sponsored by analytics specialist Heap shows that how well a company uses data and employs it in its decision making can provide up to a 2.5 times average increase in business outcomes across the board.

Nowadays there are apps for almost everything. As users they clutter up our phones and tablets, but they present problems for businesses too, in particular the storing and analysis of the data they create.

Data is often tied to a specific app and each app needs its own copy, so enterprises can end up with lots of copies of the same information leading to issues with control, compliance and more.

Real-time data is a 'must-have' not just a 'nice-to have' according to 78 percent of respondents to a new survey into the data strategies of more than 500 IT leaders.

The study from DataStax finds real-time data pays off in two ways: it leads to increased revenue growth and improved developer productivity. For example, 71 percent of all respondents say that they can tie their revenue growth directly to having real-time data.

In a new survey 42 percent of respondents say at least half of their data is 'dark data' -- retained by the organization, but never used.

The study from Quest Software, in collaboration with the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), highlights the top challenges and innovations in data governance, data management and DataOps.

As the volume of data continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, organizations often struggle to manage the health and quality of their data sets.

To deal with this IBM has announced that it's acquiring Israel-based Databand.ai, a provider of data observability software that helps organizations fix issues with their data, including errors, pipeline failures and poor quality before it impacts their bottom-line.

The benefits of 5G could be worth up to £7bn ($8.5bn) a year to the UK economy by 2030, but more needs to be done to ensure the country doesn't miss out on the benefits.

Research from Vodafone shows that while the 5G rollout has so far focused on major cities, towns and smaller cities are at risk of losing out.

The increasing threat of data breaches and ransomware is leading more business to encrypt all of their data according to a new report.

The report, from hardware-encrypted USB drive maker Apricorn, is based on a study of 100 UK IT decision makers carried out by Vanson Bourne and finds 47 percent now require the encryption of all data both at rest and in transit.

Web scraping -- collecting data from websites -- has been around almost as long as the internet has existed. But recently it's gone from a little-known niche to a serious activity, using automation to collect large amounts of information.

We spoke to Julius Černiauskas, CEO of data acquisition company Oxylabs to find out more about web scraping and how it has evolved.

The phrase "information is the new oil" is tossed about with relative abandon these days. Data is undoubtedly one of the most critical elements in a successful 21st century business, but its utility only becomes apparent after it has been subjected to some kind of thoughtful analysis.

For many businesses, this is where the struggle begins; how can we extract meaningful insights from data quickly, efficiently and effectively? How do we shorten the lag between the moment a new data point is generated and the time that data becomes available to business analytics tools or a real-time machine learning (ML) model?

Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is the most important factor in competitiveness, say 74 percent of companies in a new survey.

The research, carried out by Forrester Consulting for Celigo, also shows that 67 percent of respondents from organizations that don't have iPaaS say a lack of visibility into the data needed to make real-time decisions and a lack of data integrity due to manual data entry, delays, incompleteness and errors are major challenges of their firms' current SaaS landscapes.