We are living in an age of exponential data growth. Financial services companies are generating data volumes that, in our experience, roughly double every two years; a gargantuan amount that continues to increase. This ‘big data’ has the potential to deliver significant business value if harnessed correctly, particularly in financial services, a sector which is arguably more data driven than any other, writes Shahbaz Ali
For example, retail banks are battling their way through an era of increased competition and regulatory reform, which is forcing them to focus their efforts on customer loyalty, while competing with new market entrants. With these requirements, data has emerged as an attractive resource, offering organisations the opportunities to identify and develop competitive advantages, improve customer service, reduce operational expenditures, and assist in simple adherence to compliance demands. Banks are faced with the challenge of inadequate storage infrastructures, resulting in untapped data potential.
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As data resources increase, banks are required to adapt their infrastructures to accommodate the unstructured data volume growth, while protecting this data in a fully compliant manner. With added public scrutiny and ever-tightening international rules on data governance, the retail banking industry needs a new approach to managing digital records. In addition to simply storing the data, banks also require a system that allows quick discovery and access to information.
Traditionally, data storage has always been designed to be ‘media’ centric. Meaning that data is stored on a disk or tape. Once the data capacity has been reached, another piece of hardware is purchased and installed to accommodate the growth. This archaic method of data storage stifles innovation, instead of planning ahead, banks are acquiring additional hardware with larger data capacities, ultimately encouraging the commoditisation of these products. This has led to many C-level technology decision makers (CTOs or CIOs) focusing on capital expenditure (CapEx) features of storage without considering the long term operational expenditure (OpEx) cost such as support and maintenance, IT staffing, staffing and facilities. These methods and storage systems are appealing due to their initial low cost, but over time the cost of ownership increases due to the lack of scalability, and need to constantly replace and purchase additional hardware.
Data defined storage
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By GlobalDataThere are significant opportunities when taking a data centric approach, banks are able to focus on the data itself rather than the infrastructure that holds it. Data defined storage is an emerging category that addresses many of the data storage issues, by uniting application, information and storage tiers into a single architecture, placing data at the centre of the equation.
Data defined storage enables data to define the architecture rather than vice versa, allowing users, applications and devices to access a repository of captured metadata. Once this data is available and transformed into information, banks have actionable business insights, which is supported by an infrastructure that is both flexible and can scale in parallel with data volumes.
For retail banks, redefining how they hold data will enable them to gain greater insights about their customers, allowing for more tailored and bespoke services. Designing storage with data at its heart lowers the total cost of ownership for banks and other organisations, and supports global compliance requirements. At a time when IT budgets are being squeezed across the board, redefining their infrastructures around the data will resolve many challenges and provide a sustainable competitive advantage, all in one simple implementation.
Shahbaz Ali is CEO at Tarmin
