Although some businesses saw revenues increase by more than $10 million, others have struggled when it comes to mining their Big Data archives, a new International Data Corp. (IDC) study shows.
The white paper, Mining for Insight: Rediscovering the Data Archive, was commissioned and has now been published by Iron Mountain Inc. It reveals that organizations of every size, across every type of industry, are literally “drowning” in data, and a huge number of them are unable to mine their archives effectively. As a result, organizations are missing out on key insights that could ultimately improve their business outcomes.
IDC’s research shows that organizations who’ve put a well-defined data archive process in place can realize value from two possible avenues – by monetizing those archives and through cost savings.
IDC’s study reveals that over half of organizations it quizzed saved at least $1 million in the last year, with the top 21 percent of these saving over $10 million. Businesses have also seen new revenue streams arise from their data archives. 39 percent of companies quizzed saw an additional $1 million in revenues, while the top 15 percent saw new revenue streams bring in over $10 million. On average, the companies polled gained an extra $7.5 million in new revenue streams from their data archives.
But in spite of the extra cash data archives can pull in, most organizations (76 percent) say they’re already maximizing their data archives’ value, and that leaves data archiving as a real blind spot for most business leaders. Moreover, just 38 percent of companies are actually using their data archives for business analysis, which IDC says is a critical process to better understand markets, improve products and services, better serve customers, and consequently drive revenues. According to IDC, this is a clear sign that most organizations are not leveraging their data archives to full efficiency.
More telling is that, of the 24 percent of business who admit they’re not doing enough to leverage their data archives, almost three quarters say it’s possible to extract at least twice the value they’re realizing today. Meanwhile, a quarter of those said they could gain up to five times or more value.
In order to better leverage their data archives, Iron Mountain and IDC recommend that organizations hire a chief data officer to work closely with chief operating and chief information officers and develop a long-term data strategy. They also recommend organizations implement a holistic, consistent archiving strategy that addresses data retention schedules, use cases, the value of data, necessary accessibility and archive costs; develop information maps of all data sources and repositories across the organization; and to consider working with a third party vendor with specific expertise to help optimize their archiving solution and free up internal IT resources to focus on more strategic and innovative work.
