It's almost a chicken-or-egg conundrum: going to cloud requires a modern data foundation, going to modern data requires a cloud foundation. The good news is both can be advanced along at the same time.
That's the word from a recent survey[1] of 504 IT executives by Deloitte, authored by a team which included Tom Davenport[2], Ashish Verma[3] and David Linthicum[4]. Both cloud computing and data modernization efforts are simultaneously reinforcing one another, the researchers report. More than nine in 10 organizations surveyed now primarily keep their data on cloud platforms, with 55% of respondents seeing data modernization as a key reason for cloud migration, second only to security and data protection.
The majority of enterprises surveyed (84%) report having data modernization efforts underway, with 34% having such initiatives "fully implemented," while half have data modernization initiatives currently underway. They define data modernization as "moving data from legacy databases to modern databases," with an emphasis on storing unstructured data such as images, customer voice audio, social media comments, and clinical notes in health care."
I asked other industry experts about the challenges of addressing data requirements within today's burgeoning cloud environments, and some express caution about making the move too quickly. "The basic management tenets are the same across on-premises and cloud, but cloud has some unique challenges," says Bill Talbot, VP of solution marketing at BMC[5]. "Managing on-premises infrastructure and software has typically been and continues to be managed by a centralized IT team that has the expertise, tools and processes to ensure business needs are met. However, the ease of access to cloud services now enables both IT and business owners to be buyers of cloud infrastructure and platform