Actian Survey of IT Decision Makers Reveals Top Data Management Challenges and Industry Shift to Hybrid Data

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Actian, the hybrid data management, analytics and integration company, announced the results of an IT Decision Maker (ITDM) survey. The “Actian Datacast 2019: Hybrid Data Trends Snapshot” polled over 300 IT professionals with key decision-making power in a company of at least 250 employees and asked them what their critical data management pains are.

Key findings from the Actian Datacast Survey:

  • 94% of ITDMs say it is important to have a system that ensures users are receiving current data, yet 58% of ITDMs say it is somewhat likely or not likely that they are using fresh or current data. This means most companies cannot provide fresh or complete access to data in real-time and at the speed of business.
  • Only 34% of enterprises using data to drive decision-making are using it to drive breakthrough insights and innovations vs. business as usual operational reporting. Business as usual operations keep enterprises running from day-to-day, but limiting data to operational reporting tasks means missing a key piece of the data puzzle – new insights that lead to awareness of products, markets, consumer trends, strategy and more.
  • 84% of enterprises would deploy more data if it were cheaper and easier to do. In addition, over 50% of these businesses say data complexity issues, due to siloed applications, are a top barrier to entry for accessing data and gaining effective real-time insights. Companies are facing difficult challenges and barriers with data due to its application-centric siloed status. A more cost-effective and flexible approach designed to contend with a brand’s specific data complexity in order to move faster, more confidently and with less risk is needed. 
  • 87% say they need hybrid solutions. A hybrid on-premise/cloud environment is a necessary asset to solving the data complexity holding companies back from fully unlocking their data for real-time insights, decision-making, trendspotting and more. This goes beyond performance and architecture to support analytics ambitions and factor in the implications of data compliance.

Key Strategic Implications for Data-Driven Enterprises

Real-Time Data is a Must Have – Businesses that leverage more of their data sooner and more frequently to generate actionable insights will outpace their competitors who are less agile. But bringing real-time data under harness for analytics also opens exciting new doors.

“Slower decision-making is only one consequence of having to wait for data to become available for analysis,” said Jack Mardack, vice president at Actian. “There are exciting new analytics use cases, like customer-360 and hyper-personalized real-time offers, that simply don’t work with stale data. This blurs the lines between traditionally separate transactional databases and data warehouses and places new demands on the data management infrastructure, where real-time availability is now a requirement.”

The Same Old Reports Won’t Cut It – Enterprises are struggling to keep up with the growing demand for business-as-usual reporting that it leaves no viable bandwidth for generating new insights. This requires that enterprises provide not only the necessary data management infrastructure to make data from all their sources available to analytics discovery, but also that they invest in and empower data teams that can pursue new insights from new data spaces.

The Future is Hybrid – Organizations are increasingly demonstrating a strategic business need for hybrid data-based insight, enabling a data-driven company to store, access and analyze data wherever the business need is and wherever compliance requirements demand – both on-premise and across multiple clouds. In this regard, it is critical for companies to adopt viable approaches to leverage both existing legacy data sources as well as top next generation cloud platforms. Further, to ensure success, it is critical that firms utilize a phased, pragmatic approach that extends rather than disrupts an enterprise’s data-driven operational capabilities. 

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