SEATTLE, April 27, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- 2nd Watch, a leading provider of cloud migration and managed cloud services, has completed a survey on data management and analytics in large enterprises. A key finding is that most organizations don’t have a mature data strategy – only 26% of survey respondents said they have any data strategy at all and 70% don’t have what they consider to be a mature data strategy – complicating their IT agility and ability to make timely, data-driven business decisions.
According to Gartner’s IT Roadmap for Data and Analytics, “Agile data and analytics capabilities are essential to build sense-and-respond capabilities and are leading organizations to unprecedented cycles of rapid innovation to meet the new requirements.” The analyst firm believes there are multiple steps in the process to becoming a data-driven organization, beginning with having a vision and strategy to establishing an operating framework and governance to “continuous intelligence” and refinement and progress.
Survey data collected by 2nd Watch supports this premise. 66% of respondents said data quality was the most important aspect of their data strategy, followed by security and privacy (61%) and integration (48%). Meanwhile, 60% of respondents claimed to have an enterprise-wide data catalog, reinforcing the notion that most organizations recognize the importance of comprehensive data management.
Why Aren’t Organizations Making Better Use of Data?
IT professionals responding to 2nd Watch’s survey were in agreement about the challenges they face in consolidating, analyzing and using their data. For instance, less than half (42%) of respondents said they have the analytics expertise in-house to meet the business needs, and nearly four in 10 respondents (38%) said that self-service analytics requires IT support, impeding innovation and stretching already thin IT resources.
Data integration is another challenge: only 39% of respondents said all their data was available for reporting and analytics. The good news is that 47% of respondents said they’re using best-of-breed integration tools with bundled data quality, governance and self-service provisioning. The bad news is that 49% are using tools included with their cloud data platform , and many of these tools lack the mature cataloging, data quality, governance and privacy services that are essential to most large organizations.
Modern Tools, Technologies and Processes to the Rescue
Legacy systems and IT architecture are impeding the ability of organizations to optimize their data, and IT is slow to respond to the analytics needs of end users due to complex data integration and management challenges. Nevertheless, progress is being made. 57% of survey respondents said they are using a cloud data warehouse, and 64% said their data is in the cloud. 52% have data science/machine learning projects in production, and 42% are testing some use cases.
In describing their data and analytics environments, 41% said moving to the cloud has allowed them to be more agile, and 44% said their cloud infrastructure and costs are under control.
“The survey findings are consistent with what we’re hearing from clients, which is they’d like to be more data-driven but resources, skills and tools stand in their way,” said Michael Elliott, Executive Director – Marketing, at 2nd Watch. “2nd Watch’s approach includes the critical data strategy as well as the architecture to ingest, integrate, manage and provision the data for all analytics. This strategy enables organizations to successfully migrate to the cloud and continue to innovate and grow with agility and cost governance.”
The 2nd Watch 2021 Data Management & Analytics study includes responses from over 150 cloud-focused IT professionals in companies with at least 4,000 employees.
For an evaluation of your organization’s data and analytics maturity, take the free 2nd Watch assessment here.
About 2nd Watch
2nd Watch is an AWS Premier Consulting Partner, Google Cloud Partner, and Microsoft Azure Gold Partner, providing professional and managed cloud services to enterprise clients. The company’s subject matter experts and software-enabled services provide companies with tested, proven, and trusted solutions with a focus on six solution areas - Enterprise Cloud Migration, Security and Compliance, Cloud Native and DevOps, Optimization, Data Engineering and Analytics, and Managed Services - allowing them to fully leverage the power of the cloud. 2nd Watch solutions are high performing, robust, increase operational excellence, decrease time to market, accelerate growth and lower risk. 2nd Watch helps enterprises design, deploy and manage cloud solutions and monitors business critical workloads 24x7. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. To learn more about 2nd Watch, visit www.2ndwatch.com.
Media contact:
Kevin Wolf
TGPR
(650) 483-1552
kevin@tgprllc.com