Data Management is essentially considered an administrative process which includes acquiring, storing, validating, processing and protecting of data, all the while ensuring reliability, timeliness and accessibility of data to its users. In order to make informed decisions, organizations are leveraging Big Data to gain deeper insights into the behavior of their consumers, market trends and possible opportunities. Allowing them to create extraordinary and dynamic customer experiences.
To wrap their head around massive collections of data and learn how to organize it, organizations these days are analyzing and storing the data they gather and turn data management platforms for solutions. Seamless data management is a product of analytically thoughtful executives and NetApp trained and certified employees. Allowing your organization to process data faster, conduct validation, less time intensive, and a dashboard containing all essentials tools required to effectively manage vast amounts of data.
If you have already begun looking at options for data management implementation and maintenance, know that leading agencies provide platforms that allow collection of data from all sources and in real-time. This enables far more effective engagement with your customers for increased CLV or customer lifetime value. If you have a team with effective NetApp training on your payroll, you can get top-shelf features like 360-degree organizational view of your enterprise. This offers you much-needed top-down overview, to make informed decisions, gain critical insights and a deeper understanding of your customer’s behavior giving you that competitive edge.
Challenges in Data Management
While collecting data is simple enough for some organizations, they are unable to manage it well enough to make some sense out of it. What is the point of collecting all that data if you are unable to use it. Organizations leveraging big data need to develop a clear understanding from the start that data management and analytics will only pay off if there is a clear objective behind collecting data and some thoughtfulness into how you will use all that collected data. Once your objectives are set, organizations can move beyond data collection and begin using efficient systems for data storage, validation, and processing, in addition to analyzing it effectively to gain valuable insights.
Another challenge data management throws your way is categorizing data collected effectively, as incorrect categorization may lead the analysis of that data to be useless. Another is, making decisions based on that data could be catastrophic. This is why data collection needs to be a conscious effort, as you cannot collect random data in hopes to use it for something – it has to be the other way round. You must know the purpose for which you are collecting data.
Data Management Best Practices
In order to get the ROI you’re expecting from data management; such as valuable insights to make data-driven decisions, you must start with business questions and then proceed to collect data to answer said questions.
It is rather important to know that observing best practices in data management will result in better analysis of your accumulated data. If your executives are crystal clear and your team has had NetApp training, you can correctly prepare and manage data to analyze and optimize effectively. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind:
- Simplify access to your emerging and traditional data
- Scrub data to instill quality into your existing business process
- Shape your data by using manipulation techniques
While having a strategy for data management is crucial, having a data management platform is what allows an organization to sort, gather and house all the information they collect. This data can then be presented visually by the platform in a way that is useful to your marketing executives. Top tier platforms are capable of managing all types of data from all sources at a central location, putting the most accurate customer and business data right at their fingertips.
Benefits of Data Management Platforms
The first step towards effectively using the large amount of data that floods in daily is managing your data, both structured and unstructured. Data management platforms allow organizations to harness the power their accumulated data provides and the insights it contains.
In fact, data management platforms enable enterprises and organizations to use their data however they please, for instance:
- Personalize customer experience
- Add value through customer interactions
- Identify root cause of business issues and marketing failures in real-time
- Reaping revenues from data-driven marketing
- Improve customer engagement
- Increase customer loyalty
Ways to Manage your Data Better
Here are a few ways in which you better manage the data you collect:
Focus on the Data Infrastructure
Focus on creating an infrastructure for your data that improves you the ability of your company to access. Find and use key business data. Technologies to keep in mind include cloud computing, virtualization, applications, and mobile devices.
Gain a Complete Understanding
Know the data you collect and realize that not all types of information are equally important. Many companies lack in basics, such as how crucial the data is, who owns the info or whether it is of a personal or a business nature. The data collected needs to be classified and mapped to understand its value. Once this is done, you can prioritize protection, security, and management efforts on data that really matters.
Be Efficient
Use archiving and deduplication technology to protect data that is critical while saving significantly on storage.
Set Policies
With vast amounts of data collected and housed in your servers, it is important that you set clear policies and guidelines for information access whether they reside in virtual, physical, or cloud environments. This unifies control access, distribution, information classification, retention, and deletion.
Stay Agile
Plan for data needs in the future through the implementation of an infrastructure that allows upgrades to support continued growth.
It is crucial that every aspect of your organization’s data management implementation and maintenance are considered prior to the development process in the planning phase. Otherwise, you risk losing considerable opportunities that could have been revealed leveraging big data. NetApp training, delivered at the operations teams’ level, will make for better storage and management of any and all data that flows through the enterprise.
In this data-driven business climate, it is important to take maximal advantage of the efficient data management ability provided by NetApp technologies; for both storage and enterprise success.