Complexity is the enemy of innovation—particularly in today’s environment where speed, agility and the ability to leverage data and intelligence are among the key factors accelerating digital transformation. One of the areas of chief concern to IT leaders is the complexity of storage and data management. In fact, 93% of decision-makers surveyed by Enterprise Strategy Group say complexity in storage and data management is impeding transformation.1
As an example of that complexity, on average these organizations rely on 23 different data management tools.2 That’s an overwhelming amount of disparate hardware, software and manual processes (not to mention the people silos) required to manage the lifecycle of data and data infrastructure—from how data is accessed, protected, governed and analyzed to how infrastructure is deployed, provisioned, replicated, upgraded and mobilized.
By capitalizing on the power of data, cloud and artificial intelligence (AI), organizations can simplify data and infrastructure management to unleash agility and accelerate data-driven transformation. This new approach is epitomized by the Unified DataOps model pioneered by HPE. Unified DataOps is a vision for a new data experience that eliminates silos and complexity through data-centric policies and automation, cloud-native control and operations, and AI-driven insights and intelligence.
Data-centric policies and automation.
Data has a continuous lifecycle. This spans test and development, production, protection and analytics. It needs to be managed holistically from creation to deletion. Software that can manage only individual parts of that lifecycle is inefficient and creates visibility gaps. With Unified DataOps, IT can apply holistic data-centric policies and automation. That means using automated and data-centric policies that manage how data is stored, accessed, protected and mobilized. Silos are eliminated and workflows are unified across the data lifecycle, wherever the data resides from the data center to edge to cloud.
Cloud-native control and operations.
Today, most data and infrastructure management software lives on premises. This model is no longer ideal (or necessary). Now that data spans from edge to cloud, visibility and control are limited and more tools are needed to follow the data. Plus, on-premises software and infrastructure must be maintained, patched and upgraded. Unified DataOps calls for cloud-native control and operations, enabling IT to manage data and infrastructure through a single plane of glass. By abstracting data and infrastructure control away from physical infrastructure, IT can manage its workflows from the cloud and orchestrate them wherever data lives. This enables the organization to gain faster access to features through cloud services, and eliminates the time and expense involved in deploying, managing and provisioning infrastructure.
AI-driven insights and intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is taking on a much more important role in driving intent-based, data-centric management of IT operations to lower costs, improve resource optimization, reduce security threats and more. With Unified DataOps, AI is deeply integrated into data management operations. The power of AI-driven insights and intelligence, combined with automation, enables a wide range of improvements and innovations in helping organizations unleash the power of their data. For example, AI insights can help IT avoid disruption by making a network change; improve application performance by rebalancing workloads in a specific way; or provision applications instantly across the entire fleet without any planning or calculations.
Taking the next step
The days of managing storage, with all of its complexity, are numbered. There has to be a better and simpler way, and now there is. HPE is delivering on the vision of Unified DataOps with the Intelligent Data Platform, a single data platform that brings together cloud data services, cloud-native infrastructure and AI-driven intelligence delivered as a service. The Intelligent Data Platform from HPE uniquely powers a new data experience that enables IT teams to collapse silos across people, process and technology to unleash data, agility and innovation across their organization.
For more information about Unified DataOps as the new vision for data and infrastructure management, please visit HPE.
1 ESG Data Management Survey, April 2021, commissioned by HPE
2 Ibid.
