IBM Driven by Data event took place in Cape Town 14 November and Johannesburg 16 November at the One&Only hotel and Zulu Nyala Country Manor respectively. These events exposed participants to the next advancements for business growth and unveiled the next generation in doing business without compromise.
The influx of data in the enterprise is having an adverse impact on various enterprises including development, manufacturing, distribution and retail. The future of storage and of business itself lies in the relentless requirement to derive ever more value from data. Data is the lifeblood of your business and how you use it makes all the difference. To be the disruptor versus the disrupted, organisations must reshape their approach to business.
IBM has a history of constant design and innovation - creating software defined and storage solutions that are more efficient, secure and better value than ever before.
Amit Dave, CTO, IBM warns that if your organisation doesn't already have a data first strategy now is the time to start implementing one. Your organisation needs to be able to manage data from multiple places, multiple environments, multiple entities and sooner or later you will need to find a way to manipulate this data into something that is meaningful, making the invisible visible.
What is the price of not knowing? Medical science, drill for natural resources, right financial indices within your organisation. Every organisation has a goldmine of information just waiting for them to tap into. This comes in the form of existing as well as archived data, which up to now is unused. This unused data can be used to learn from it, patterns you can recognise about your consumers or clients. You already have this information. Dave warns that there is a perfect storm coming on what you don't already know. This information is readily available in the form of unstructured data that is garnered from your tweets, pictures your posted, Facebook, Instagram and so forth - this is called monetising data. This information is sold to and used to determine your patterns and decisions are made about and on your behalf using this information.
Maximilian von Bonin, enterprise storage leader, IBM MEA, details how business is on the cusp of a new era. Successful businesses are leveraging their data more effectively and this has an impact in your business; on the IT world and your expectations of your innovation and IT partner. He goes on to say that as a result storage needs to be secure, resilient and robust; and from a wider humanitarian perspective, i.e. cancer, education and crime, are essentially data problems and we need the date to work and the infrastructure to get the data to work in different ways. Therefore the theme - your business without compromise means we are seeing exponential returns by businesses making use of data in more beneficial ways.
How do you build knowledge from the primary data and put it to work in your organisations - improve the service to your clients?
IBM can help you through this era of driving your data sets to work for you. It is not a big bang approach in terms of leveraging these data sets you need to take logical steps and implement it. You need to lean in and have confidence in your plan and you cannot be hesitant in this era of data around your plan as to how you are going to capitalise on this data. IBM has been around for 106 years and has the broadest storage portfolio in industry. Von Bonin explains how IBM can assist organisations from a storage infrastructure perspective and how you can modernise, leverage traditional and take advantage of new options available. The economics of an All Flash environment are too compelling. No traditional attributes fall away yet you can expect exponential returns with IBM as your partner.
Nicholas Eayrs, HortonWorks, explains what they do jointly with their partners IBM, Redhat and Obsidian to help their customers drive competitive advantage from data and deliver success for them. Eayrs speaks to the new way of business which is fuelled by connected data which is driven by the mega trends: IOT; AI; cloud computing; stream processing which are driving growth of significant scale. HortonWorks partnership with IBM is a value proposition that is unrivalled. HortonWorks and IBM are extending data science and machine learning to more developers and across the Apache Hadoop ecosystem. The companies are combining Hortonworks Data Platform (HDP) with IBM Data Science Experience and IBM Big SQL into new integrated solutions designed to help everyone from data scientists to business leaders better analyse and manage their mounting data volumes and accelerate data-driven decision-making. {Source: https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/52572.wss)
Jaen Swart, Red Hat, talks about open source. He explains that open is more than a modifier: it is a key driver of innovation. Source code is free, and on the one side the data is there for you to look at, use, modify and enhance and on the other side there is a community, where you can collaborate and innovate together. Through this union disruption is a reality. Data formats are moving from consistent to inconsistent, no one knows where the data will come from or how it will look. Gartner speaks to 50 billion connected IOT devices. The Red Hat way opens the possibilities of your data through workload optimisation; interoperability; agile data integration and application development; resilience and scalability; comprehensive security; cost effectiveness and seamless transition from the physical and virtual to the cloud. It is important that businesses leverage open source communities with absolutely no lock-in.
We are in a data age, in the security field we are in a 'perfect storm', outrageous amounts of data and connected devices resulting in the security risk growing exponentially, this according to Kevin McKerr, security specialist, IBM South Africa.
Who has got your personal data - how difficult would it be for us to know who exactly has access to this data? The challenges faced by organisations today is to understand where the data is; what you can do with it and who you can share it with. Infosec has evolved to an immune system, no one disciple holds the key - this is what we are aspiring towards according to McKerr.
Data security cannot be considered in isolation anymore. The two disciplines that are inexplicably linked are application security and data security. Most compromises occur in the application, where hackers can get direct access to sensitive and critical information, yet the investment in security across businesses in this area is small by comparison.
McKerr explains that cyber security is a huge problem, and many companies just don't have the necessary resources to keep up with the level of threat out there today. Data security is two-fold, breaches and protecting information and compliance - and compliance is the number one reason why people buy security controls. The intersection is privacy. Fundamental best practices of information security - 'you don't build a two thousand dollar fence to protect a fifty dollar horse', not all data is equal. Information and data security is a journey. IBM believes that defences should be intelligent and integrated. They should adapt to today's threats and keep you far ahead of tomorrow's.
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