Bridgeworks CEO David Trossell speaks to ITProPortal about investing in data acceleration solutions to help them stay ahead of their competitors.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2017
Financial Services: Turning data management into an invaluable asset
With financial services being ever increasingly data-driven, the cost-focus of data management needs to shift because data is a company’s most invaluable asset. Organisations therefore need to ask themselves questions about how to invest wisely to gain value from their data. By doing so they can be able to gain faster customer insight, achieve a higher level of innovation by developing new markets and products based on the information they glean from big data, become more profitable and they can attain a competitive advantage over their competitors in one way or another. The key to achieving this is found in real-time data analytics to create and find value in your data.
Alex McMullan, CTO, EMEA at Pure Storage, writes in CBR magazine: “Today’s networked world is creating incredible amounts of data at an ever-increasing rate. The challenge for the Financial Services industry is in how they can unlock the potential in the data, making use of insight rather than intuition in decision making, to reduce costs and drive revenue generation.”
Top 5 value creation tips
Given the increasing complexity of data management, and with consideration to the fact that CIOs are expected to reduce costs while doing more with less, here are my top 5 tips for turning data management into an invaluable asset:
1. Ensure that you are compliant to all of the required regulations – including the General Data Protection Regulations, which come into force quite soon. This will create value from engendering customer confidence in how you handle their data.
2. Deploy data acceleration solutions that are supported by machine learning and artificial intelligence because the growth of big data volumes could mean that you’ll otherwise miss the big picture and not be able to gain and handle the insights and opportunities it offers you. These solutions mitigate the effects of data and network latency far better than WAN optimisation does. They, for example, work well with encrypted data.
3. While in some cases new infrastructure may be needed, with the right data acceleration solution there should be no need to replace your existing infrastructure. Remember that increasing your bandwidth won’t necessarily mitigate data and network latency sufficiently, but with a data acceleration solution you can achieve more accurate and faster data analysis.
4. Think of your data as your most invaluable asset, and back it up regularly to ensure that when a problem arises you can maintain business and service continuity. Without data many businesses would simply not be able to operate, and without the ability to analyse big data your competitors could jump a step ahead of you. So invest in good data management.
5. Remember that with efficient data management and resilient networks, the opportunity is there to do more with less and in less time. As well as cutting costs you’ll be able to make better strategic decisions that’ll help you to offer innovative digital products and services. With a faster and more resilient network you’ll also be able to achieve and maintain a competitive advantage through the development of a good and robust reputation.
Financial services organisations are under increasing pressure to compete with new entrants to their markets – whether they be in banking, insurance or in other areas of financial services. They therefore need to find ways to keep a step ahead of their traditional and new competitors. One way to achieve this is to turn big data, big data analytics and data management as a whole into the most invaluable assets that your organisation has. This value has to come from finding and creating value from the data – not just by looking at historical data. The here and now is crucial today for generating it, and to achieve this financial services organisations should invest in data acceleration solutions to stay ahead of your competitors while increasing the accuracy of your data at speed with increased veracity.