Poor data management an underrated threat

Johannesburg, 03 Sept 2009

Most companies still do not realise the risks of poor data management, says Brian Balfe, business development director for CommVault Systems Africa.

“Companies need to realise the value of their data and how it should best be managed to avoid huge costs for storing, hunting down and retrieving lost information and, in the worst cases, public embarrassment or litigation by not being able to locate critical data on time,” advises Balfe.

In SA, states Balfe, the biggest challenge regarding data management is the financial impact of having to recover or recreate information, as well as the opportunity cost of being unable to act on a new business prospect in time.

The unnecessary cost and complexity in IT environments is a result of the way companies manage their data, with little joined-up thinking applied to the data management problem as one single linked issue, he continues.

“High levels of organic growth over the last 10 years have kept companies so busy tending to operations that there hasn^1t been time to plan effectively. This includes the way information is managed, as opposed to stored or transferred,” explains Balfe.

Balfe advises CEOs to question their CIOs on issues regarding data management, such as how long data should be kept, audited, kept safe, stored, and how regularly retrieval should be tested.

“Most companies sit with lots of individual, costly software solutions that manage bits of the data management puzzle but provide no way of seeing the complete picture from one place. Companies need to get their data to live longer than their hardware, while ensuring it remains recoverable,” says Balfe.

He adds that companies need a pre-planned way around data recovery problems, instead of routinely incurring enormous non-budgeted crises expenses for e-discovery that does not fix the underlying problem.

“New generation unified data management systems can help companies successfully drive this cost and complexity out of data management,” concludes Balfe.