MTI Managed Service Series for the CIO

PART 2: Managing and monetising big data

Increasing volumes of data are a major concern for CIOs up and down the country. At the forefront of their minds are questions about how to manage and monetise it. Struggling to deal with not only the amount, but also the rising complexity of this data, CIOs are not receiving the extra resource they need to handle the challenge.

Recent MTI research found that more than a quarter of IT professionals working in the UK (27%) feel that adding extra resource to their IT departments would allow them to become a strategic tool within the business. For example, if the task of storing and managing large and ever-changing volumes of data is removed from a CIO’s daily list of tasks, then more of their time can be spent on the strategic analysis of the data, transforming the IT environment into a valuable asset. MTI clients that originally outsourced data to the cloud simply for efficiency reasons, are now seeing a real return on investment from the move, with the IT department now actually bringing money into the company.

With the support of a solution such as a managed service, a CIO can outsource backup, file serving and archiving capabilities to the cloud, removing the need for storing data on-site. CIOs can still retain control by deciding exactly what kinds of data they want to sit in the cloud, and then a tailored solution can be created. The management of the cloud environment can also be outsourced, with teams monitoring the infrastructure 24/7 and flagging any problems before the effects hit the network. This can also help to avoid costly system downtime.

In these tough economic times, organisations are increasingly focused on scalability, whereby they only pay for the services they need and use. Flexible and scalable IT solutions enable CIOs to run efficient and cost-effective IT environments, whilst also enabling them to access more storage or bandwidth if required. Managed services allow CIOs to outsource as little or as much of their data and applications as they want or need to, for a price that matches the service.

Outsourcing large amounts of complex data to a managed service provider can liberate a CIO, allowing them to focus on analysing the data and turning it into a valuable asset, which can benefit other business lines driving company growth and profitability.