Data is the most important asset of any organization. Recognizing, analyzing and extracting data from various vital documents helps businesses to make the right business decisions. Digital copy of all important business documents can be generated with the help of document scanning services. The digital copy of vital data can be use for data analysis and data management efficiently.
Managing huge volumes of documents is a major challenge for business organizations. They have to store emails, invoices, receipts and other documents in cabinets and folders. Retrieving a file from this pile of documents could be very tedious and organizing these documents can be time-consuming. This may hinder workflow and also reduce the productivity of the organization. By digitizing all paper-based documents, easy access and use can be ensured.
Data Management Processes
Data management comprises all activities needed to manage data as a valuable resource. Data management is the key to ensuring security and privacy for business information in the growing IoT and smart systems space.
Data management includes the following:
- Data backup
- Data security
- Data sharing
- Data warehousing and business intelligence management
- Data reference and master data management
- Destruction of redundant data
- Records management
- Storage of documents and records
- Data governance
- Data architecture
- Data quality management
- Management of databases
IDC’s “Global Datasphere” report states that businesses and consumers will have the capacity to consume 175 Zettabytes by 2025, which is increasingly difficult to manage and protect; yet data loss of any sort is not an option. With rising amount of data that is scattered across the organization, data must be managed intelligently.
Intelligent Data Management Is More Than Just Data Backup
Intelligent data management is when all data stores are governed by a single method-one that allows for it to be backed up, secure and available. It is a set of solutions to help organizations reduce cost, complexity, and time when they want to analyze their data in order to extract some meaningful insights.With intelligent data management, IT teams can make the data quickly and always available for the mobile, dynamic world in a secure multi-cloud environment and, using predictive analytics, anticipate and meet the needs of users across the globe.
At the ActifioData Driven 2019 conference held last year, the message that emerged regarding data protection was that the world of data protection is changing drastically and businesses need to change with it. Backup of data is of course necessary, but that is only one aspect of data protection. Intelligent data management can help enterprises use copies of their data for more than just backup. Intelligent data management is made easy by the cloud’s ability to provide huge amounts of compute power. Since data can be collected, categorized and automated for optimal backup and disaster recovery, it has led to an increase of data use for application development, training ML algorithms, and compliance. As a result, the process of creating and maintaining data copies that has been a cost center and insurance policy has been transformed into a strategic asset for generating business insight and revenue.
Rene Lopez, managing director of infrastructure at Delta Airlines, said Actifio’s backup capabilities initially drove Delta Air Lines to use the product. Delta’s highly complex infrastructure has about 1,000 applications and two data sets from its merger with Northwest Airlines in April 2008. Data was in multiple silos, with no association between them or no standardized way to view all data.
Actifio introduced intelligent data management to consolidate the sprawling infrastructure. This made it easier to find the mission applications and data needed to keep planes flying. While consolidating data for better access and backup of data, Delta found other uses for that data. Lopez found that these data could be used for marketing initiatives for sharing flight data, informing travellers about flight delays and the reasons behind it. The processes for determining what data is relevant to which passengers, automating the dissemination of data, and doing it all in a compliant manner is possible when everything is well connected.
Christophe Bertrand, senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), said that as per his study, 71% of organizations know where and what their data is and for more than just backup. In his research he found that the biggest barrier to getting to that point was a company culture that was resistant to change.
A veeam.com article by Danny Allan lists the 5 stages of intelligent data management.
- Backup: Data backup on a regular basis is vital to ensure that the data is recoverable in the event of unforeseen outages, attacks, theft or loss.
- Aggregation: The data must be protected and made available across multi-cloud environments to facilitate digital services. Also, ensure the aggregated view of service level compliance.
- Orchestration: Move data to the best location across multi-cloud environments to ensure business continuity, security, compliance and optimal use of resources for various business processes.
- Visibility: Ensure improved data management across multi-cloud environments with clear and consistent visibility and control into usage, operations, and performance issues.
- Automation: This is important because with automation data becomes self-managing by developing the capability to back itself up, migrate to ideal locations according to business requirements, secure itself during anomalous activity and recover instantly.
Efficient management of documents and data will save time and also increase productivity and efficiency, while improving the workflow as well. Digitization of documents helps in saving, storing and protecting the sensitive data. The digitized documents ensure multiple access to documents from different locations and quick retrieval of information. If your organization is planning to digitize your documents and implement a good data management system, approach a reliable document scanning company that can provide error-free data conversion at affordable rates.
