“Data, not oil, is your new most valuable resource.”
That’s the mantra behind a slew of articles published over the past year about the emerging digital enterprise. And the comparison makes sense: your data is the untapped secret weapon to gain competitive advantage, the commodity that’s so valuable it’s earned a place at the table in many leading C-suites.
Despite its prevalence, the metaphor leaves one important question unanswered: how do we get there? How do we make the best use of our data?
1. Don’t Lock Up Your Data
Putting your data in a traditional archive is like putting your brand-new sports car into mini-storage, paying the storage boss every time you want to visit, and never being able to store the car elsewhere…forever. (Spoiler alert: this is a win-win for the storage boss.)
Traditional archives lock your data into their proprietary system and charge lucrative license fees for you to access it. That puts you at a data-disadvantage:
-You’re rarely going to use it
-You’re getting little benefit from it
-You probably don’t even know what’s all in there
-All of this is costing you money—more so as time goes on
Does this sound like the strategy of a digital enterprise?
2. Get Data Where You Need It, When You Need It
Bust that data sports car out of the mini-storage archive and tear up the Pacific Coast Highway…or Pike’s Peak…or Ol’ Route 66. Wherever. And do it whenever you want.
How? By analyzing your legacy NAS files to see what you’ve got and moving them to cloud-based object storage. You can leave your data in full native object—without wrapper, sharding, deduplication, lock-in, or access fees.
With new applications like Athena that are built on S3, you can query old files to know which data you have and extract value from them, all while maintaining ownership of your files.
A recent World Economic Forum blog stated, “Unlike oil, the value of data doesn’t grow by merely accumulating more. It is the insights generated through analytics and combinations of different data sets that generate the real value.” We couldn’t agree more, and it’s this value that we think StorageX, our award-winning file management platform, helps you generate.
