
As the shift to home working has become standard for businesses globally, cloud is king. The pandemic, ensuing lockdowns and office closures increased the urgency at which enterprises needed to evolve, and the cloud has been a key enabler of that. Enterprises have undergone years’ worth of transformation in a matter of months, to become reliant on service delivery models hosted on cloud infrastructure.
Cloud providers have subsequently stepped up to bear the brunt of a transformed landscape. According to a recent IDC Survey Spotlight looking at the impact of COVID-19 on IT spending, more than a third of businesses are planning to move to the cloud more aggressively. We’re even seeing businesses who were opposed to the idea, embracing it. And we’re seeing businesses set out their stall in the ‘new normal’. Google will conduct all of its interviews on Hangouts, legal discussions are happening remotely. Telehealth is finally here too – and working to effect in cities and towns across the UK.
As COVID-19 has accelerated the move from a ‘cloud first’ to a ‘cloud now’ approach, the adoption curve is set to be compressed from decades to just a few years. And for many enterprises, without the opportunity to migrate much of the business to the cloud, they could now be looking at a very different reality. But as the approach becomes standard, enterprises need to ask the question, what about our data?
Understand what the organisation needs to take with it
There’s no shying away from the fact that change has come at every organisation and fast. And enterprises need to be mindful of their data when restructuring both operationally and culturally in response to change, as the risk of complacent handling of data is likely heightened. A critical decision ahead of any enterprise’s migration to the cloud is to comprehensively evaluate the data in its possession, assess its real business value and make decisions about what needs to be kept, and what needs to be appropriately sanitised.
The process of assessing data ahead of a cloud migration is a practice that any enterprise with vast data lakes should be carrying out as standard. It’s a basic hygiene factor that helps organisations stay on top of their data management practices and helps strengthen security. It’s crucial that the enterprise does not unnecessarily store data that no longer holds any value to the business. What this regular assessment of data presents is an opportunity for the enterprise to employ proper methods of data classification; categorising and organising data to ensure its most effective and efficient use and getting rid of redundant, obsolete or trivial (ROT) data.
Classification of data encourages enterprises to make decisions about what data should be saved, and what data should be sanitised. Why is this so important? Proper understanding of your data guarantees that it is always accounted for, ensuring compliance with regulations and risk mitigation. Furthermore, sanitisation and the erasure of unused data will ultimately save money. If you have less data to store, then you’ll have less storage to pay for.
Another practice that helps in reaching a conclusion on what data to move is to have a strong understanding of your data’s lifecycle. Enterprises can orchestrate a step-by-step approach of internal screening to garner a consensus on the perceived longevity and future use of data. Close, continued analysis of the value of data will give an idea of its lifecycle and ultimately contributes to cost savings.