To get people to buy into your data idea, take them on a journey

They told me that the first thing to do is protect the business of your enterprise and thus protect the data. The best way to do that is to backup the data. Robe said that this is often a step that businesses pay insufficient attention to.

Robe stated: “You backup, you think you are OK. But you have to make sure that you recover correctly. And recovery is much more important than backup, in fact.”

The second step is aggregation which involves having a complete view of the data, no matter where it is. The data could be located on private cloud, on public cloud, in a data centre, and in SaaS products like Office 365. Sandner said that this phenomenon of data residing in many private, virtual and cloud locations is known as ‘data sprawl’.

Step three is to ensure there is visibility of the data, and step four is about the orchestration and portability of data to allow business continuity – “making sure that data is in the right IT infrastructure before things can happen,” said Sandner. He said that an example of orchestration is the scaling up or down of resources to accommodate fluctuating workloads.

And the fifth and final step is “really intelligent data management,” which is not really a step and essentially the destination.