Intelligent CIO Africa Issue 23 | Page 77

INTELLIGENT BRANDS // Software for Business Tapping into the evolution of data management ///////////////////////////// “But this comes at a cost and that remains a huge challenge in most boardrooms.” According to Redstor, few businesses realise they can achieve their data management goals without compromising on agility. Backup, recovery, archiving, migration and DR can be managed through a single web-based control centre, empowering IT departments while reducing costs, simplifying deployment and billing, improving security and compliance and providing borderless visibility of your entire data estate. Marais has also underlined the relevance of the lifecycle of data. Danie Marais, Director of Product Management at Redstor D anie Marais, Director of Product Management at global data management SaaS specialist Redstor, says businesses have an opportunity to tap into the evolution of data management and take advantage of solutions that are being developed for AI, Robotics, Machine Learning and the cloud. As a forward-looking software developer, Redstor has incorporated the future of data and AI-driven commerce into its development cycle. “Some companies have already started moving toward customer grade user experiences by using things like NetApp where they have replication technologies built in, replicating their data in real time to another storage system, sending snapshots that they can roll back to and instantly fire up when needing a restore,” said Marais. www.intelligentcio.com Along with key themes of driving performance while reducing spend, how data tiering impacts cost optimisation and cloud integration, Marais says that, for businesses who rely on data, reducing the costs associated with processing and managing can be a quick win. “We are talking about reducing IT management overheads, storage costs and improving reliability as well as compliance,” he said. • • • • • How frequently it’s accessed If it’s high risk data or not Who are the users involved with the data Where it’s being used Making your IT manager’s job two to three times easier by letting data management technology of the future take over the responsibility Another reality of the data-centric market is that it demands agility to be able to keep up. “Technology is changing regularly and the bigger players might struggle to move their direction with legacy code – they are essentially too big to make speedy changes that scale,” added Morais. “It takes years for them to change their culture, train sales and presales and bring new technologies to market. The difference that a smaller, focused service provider makes, is that it is positioned at the forefront of innovation. It listens to customer feedback and the business is just the right size to manoeuvre easily while delivering monthly releases to its customers.” n “Businesses benefit from centralised visibility and improved data accessibility for users.” Using AI to strengthen data value Artificial Intelligence is now a pervasive trend in the market. Analytics tools can provide insight where data sits on a network and how it can be managed more efficiently. Redstor believes AI will bring the ability for technology to investigate data, in all the different silos it resides in: • Working out how important that data is to your business INTELLIGENTCIO 77