Explaining some important data management concepts and terms

With the current economic slowdown, it looks like another recession could be on the cards in 2023. This usually heralds a period of consolidation within IT and the closing of the purse strings with regards to planned investments. In previous decades this was standard practice, but now that we’re in a digital age, many businesses can’t afford to slow down their digital transformations if they want to survive.

Sustainability is imperative to all our futures and is directly impacted by every device we use that consumes power. This includes the on-premises and cloud infrastructures that power our digital work lives. To be as sustainable as possible we need to ensure that we are consuming the least amount of infrastructure to host our workloads and services, without impacting their availability, performance or governance.

Upgrade today to maintain support and subscription services Article by Gareth Headley, VCIX – DCV, vExpert, VMware Infrastructure Specialist at Q Associates, a Logicalis company.

Business Process Management (BPM) has had something of a chequered history in the enterprise space. While Lean, Six Sigma and other quality methodologies have led some organisations to embrace formal process management as part of their DNA, others have not achieved the same level of traction.

Chatbots are all around us. Visit any eCommerce website today and the chances are it’ll instantly present you with a ‘How can I help you today?’ pop-up. The global market for intelligent virtual assistants is expected to grow at a CAGR of 28.5% from 2021 to 2028, and social media is full of amusing stories of parrots and small children wreaking havoc via Alexa.

Effective Business Process Management (BPM) is an essential foundation for any successful business digitalisation and automation strategy. In summary, you can’t successfully automate a process unless you understand it fully, and BPM provides this understanding.

There are plenty of statistics around the staggering amount of data being created and consumed globally every day. 2.5 quintillion (million million million) bytes created daily by internet users, a 5000% increase in data interactions between 2010 and 2020, and so on.

Data is a valuable business asset, yet many organizations are still not managing it with the same rigour they apply to physical assets.

As data becomes an increasingly valuable asset, organisations have to adapt, to manage and protect their data to ensure it delivers maximum value to the business.

There are plenty of informative and valuable articles on the web about trends in data storage technology, discussing everything from reducing last byte latency to the wonders of consumption-based pricing. Data and storage are hot topics, unsurprisingly in an age where, as Mckinsey puts it, ‘“digital” and “data” have become the talk of the town.’

Heritage technologies - mainframe, Unix and magnetic tape in particular – have long been a rich source for the ‘is x technology dead?’ debate. Technical pundits fill the web with head scratching over why they haven’t disappeared, or defences for their survival.

In challenging economic times, organisations naturally look to cut back or defer non-essential investment. IT spend has traditionally been one of the areas businesses look to first when the need arises to cut budgets or delay projects, sometimes creating a ‘good enough IT’ mindset, where any IT asset that is doing the job reasonably effectively today is maintained beyond the last responsible moment for replacement.

"Unix is dead, long live Unix" – a headline that is still as topical today as it was in 2009, when a blog with that title was published to mark Unix’s 40th birthday.

In its broadest sense, virtualisation can be seen as the progressive freeing up of any computing function – compute, storage, network – from the constraints of its physical infrastructure. So far, virtualisation has been a continuous evolution, from the first virtual machines (VMs) to the world of hybrid cloud, and there is no sign yet of this evolution losing momentum.