Symantec’s recent announcement of its Data Insight product is a signal that the company sees an important opportunity to move up the value chain by delivering a richer set of business benefits to its customers. It’s also another indication that the industry as a whole is starting to better understand the importance of Information Optimization (IO).
According to Symantec, Data Insight “enables organizations to improve data governance through insights into the ownership and usage of unstructured data.” So, in part, their new product will be useful for their traditional risk mitigation business. If you have better insight into your data assets, you can make smarter decision about what to protect—and respond more intelligently to breaches of your information security policies.
Symantec also claims that Data Insight will help companies lower data costs by enabling them to better allocate storage resources based on business use.
But risk mitigation and cost control are only part of the IO equation. The other part is actually enabling the business to get more value out of its information assets on a daily basis. And, by providing insight into who is using unstructured information and how they’re using it, Symantec is taking one small step towards the value-adding side of IO.
Other big vendors are beginning to understand IO as a continuum that extends from data protection on one end to improved utilization on the other. HP, for example, has assembled disparate solutions ranging from its Data Protector software to its Neoview data warehouse under a Business Information Optimization (BIO) banner.
Generally speaking, this is good news. Most businesses have made tremendous investments in information technology and now have massive amounts of unstructured data dispersed across the enterprise that is woefully under-utilized. The impact that improved use of this data can potentially have on business performance is tremendous.
In fact, it is probably safe to say that businesses can potentially get much greater financial benefit from tapping the vast information wealth that already exists in their unstructured data—but that remains under-utilized on a daily basis—than they can by trying to generate any new business data.
So it’s good to see vendors like Symantec and HP validating the IO marketspace by introducing new products and re-packaging existing technologies to address inefficiencies in data governance and utilization.
As businesses begin to reap the benefits of these IO solutions—and as industry analysts perform their essential ecosystem function of aggregating the disparate anecdotal experiences of these businesses into a coherent understanding of the IO value proposition—we will likely see other vendors follow suit.
Ideally, this will result in a “virtuous cycle” where more businesses are appropriately evangelized about IO and begin to adopt both the technologies and best practices they need to more effectively utilize their existing information assets.
Whatever course the market takes, organizations of all kinds are only going to get hungrier for ways to overcome data waste. People are still not finding it easy enough to consistently get the exact information they need to take the best possible action for the business now. That’s why IO’s appeal is growing.
data waste, HP, Information Optimization, insight, IO, Symantec, unstructured data
