Malaysia’s data management priorities

As countries across the globe launch smart nation initiatives, data and information is placed at the forefront of this change Malaysia too is looking to become a data-driven, digital nation.

Malaysia is a key market for Commvault as the data management company continues to see increasing IT spend among enterprises in the country.

Commvault Country Manager for Malaysia and Brunei, Freddie Soon said, “According to Gartner, IT spending in Malaysia will record the highest growth rate in Asia Pacific this year, reaching almost USD16 billion (RM69 billion), up 7.6 percent from 2015, as the adoption of the cloud, big data and analytics, and anywhere computing continues to grow.”

He added that Commvault will also continue to serve existing customers in their data management and technology roadmaps such as Takaful Malaysia, Pos Malaysia and Tenaga Nasional Berhad.

Where is the growth coming from?

According to an IDC survey, many organisations in Malaysia are still managing data assets at a departmental (siloed) level, spread across different locations including third-party data centres and highly virtualised environments. This is a similar situation across Asia Pacific with two in five companies still managing data at a departmental level.

Soon believed that data and information is now, more so than ever, the lifeblood of businesses. “It has become the fourth strategic asset next to financial, physical and human.

“If you aren’t using your data to drive actionable outcomes, your competitors surely are. But in order to understand the value that lies in your data, it needs to be accurate, secure and accessible.”

Notably, this calls for organisations needing to re-prioritise their focus towards ensuring they have a rock-solid data management strategy that is scalable and flexible for accelerated growth.

A patchwork quilt of tools to address their data management needs is not going to cut it anymore, in other words. The focus will now be towards adopting single platform solutions to deliver centralised visibility of distributed information assets and provide the ability to see enterprise data through one consistent view.

Soon further explained, “CIOs need to adopt a comprehensive enterprise-wide data management strategy to ensure they are capable of turning data and information into a competitive business differentiator.”

The adoption of an end-to-end solution enables businesses to consolidate all data into a single, virtual repository, reducing the risk around data loss and leakage.

A rethink, of course

A rethink on how organisations protect and manage data to gain more intelligence, cut costs and reduce operational complexity from the growth of “big data” is critical.

A consolidated approach to data management enables CIOs to reduce infrastructure, management and training costs, while employees across the enterprise – not just IT managers – can easily repurpose data and quickly search, access, and create information to enable better decision making and collaboration.

New recovery mandates are also critical.

The new generation of ‘always on’ consumers/end-users simply don’t accept downtime – and neither can the organisations that serve them. Having a business continuity plan is pure common sense as it arms organisations with the ability to think ahead to ensure information is available quickly in the event of a failure or disaster.

With applications extending beyond the data centre to a broad mix of physical, virtual and cloud platforms, a robust and tested disaster recovery capability is more of an imperative to improve business resiliency, decrease risk of data loss, and provide users with higher availability to data.