IT Managers are in a bind. Faced with massive file growth and stagnant (if not shrinking) budgets, IT professionals are no longer able to simply buy their way out of the pain.
IT has to get more efficient.
At a time when IT departments are being forced to do more with less, the traditional approach of buying more data storage simply isn’t an option. Since managing more data costs more, IT managers have to rethink and reevaluate how they manage their growing data.
Small businesses usually fall into one of three areas when it comes to backing up their business files. The first group isn’t backing up their data at all and is truly playing with fire. According to U.S. Dept. of Labor Statistics, 43 percent of all businesses that have data disasters never reopen. Some 29 percent of the rest fail within two years.
These are challenging times for IT organizations everywhere. After all, never before has IT had so many mission-critical applications to support, such stringent service level agreements (SLAs) to meet, or more complex infrastructures to manage. Given these circumstances, it would be understandable if IT organizations opted to put green IT projects and initiatives on the backburner.
"Choosing Google has meant saving a much-appreciated $1 million per year in the midst of a fiscal crisis," said Wesley Watts, CIO of the district.
Like many organizations, Prince George's County Public Schools (PGCPS) was struggling with a traditional on-premise email system, with multiple mail gateways that required a lot of IT staff to maintain. Complying with requirements for legal discovery and open records requirements was also a huge challenge. In particular, the school district's IT department struggled to ensure a complete collection of requested data.
To succeed in today's data rich environment, Business Intelligence (BI) experts are looking to un-archive data and put it back into the analytics domain. "Life Events" are now being analyzed using super-computing resources. Data about having children, buying a new car, or even simple TV purchases do not happen every 6 months by the same consumer. To understand your customer, their family, their patterns over the full life of your relationship with them, data warehousing experts want to include up to 10 or 20 years of data into their analytic environments. All they need is good performance, and a beneficial return on investment (ROI) to get the budget for their programs.
