How the BOHH Labs/Approyo Partnership Can Accelerate the Transition to SAP HANA in the Cloud

The enterprise technology landscape is rapidly changing, and more companies are embracing digital transformation and integrating cloud services to enhance business agility, efficiency and extract analytics. In fact, technology leader in business applications, SAP, has pegged a deadline of 2025 for when it will terminate support for its ECC6 on-premise solution.

For businesses looking to migrate to more advanced SAP HANA systems in the cloud, this may seem like a long way off, but the deadline shouldn’t be the only driving force behind your migration strategy. Cloud-based SAP HANA solutions offer businesses a vast array of benefits, as they look to harness the potential of digitization and business transformation.

However, digital transformation is an evolving market and there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. For businesses to be successful in their transformation to cloud-based SAP HANA solutions, there must be collaboration, and Approyo and BOHH Labs have teamed up to offer SAP customers seamless migration to SAP HANA cloud environments. Approyo CEO, Chris Carter, and BOHH Labs CEO, Simon Bain, illustrate below how strategic partnerships can create a best in breed solution that bring success for the end customer.

Chris shares:
As part of the push to move to the cloud, SAP has developed SAP S/4HANA, which is built on the advanced in-memory platform, SAP HANA, and is an entirely new generation of SAP Business Suite. It fundamentally redefines how enterprise software creates value across industries with instant insight. SAP S/4HANA also personalizes the user experience on any device and natively connects to Big Data, the Internet of Things, and business and social networks - all in real time.

Like all new things, especially in technology, the updates can be daunting. Approyo can help businesses move SAP applications, such as SAP S/4HANA, to the cloud with tailored implementation roadmaps to ensure every organization undergoes a seamless migration. We are one of the only SAP partners in the world that can migrate SAP applications to the cloud, provide ongoing support and provide long term managed services for hosted cloud environments.

Simon Shares:
While Approyo specializes in making SAP migrations smooth from an implementation standpoint, we combine with their capabilities to make the migration smooth by enabling better security and access to data stored with SAP HANA. We bring security to the data and the business suite, so customers can get simple access to their complex data. We provide total security on all stored data by uniquely providing database or specific file security, enabling prioritization and control of sensitive data. BOHH’s security service provides full text search capabilities, even on secured data, and supports Bot technology for data to be conveniently accessed and bring enhanced access flow to data within the system.

Chris adds: 
Often companies are hesitant to migrate completely to cloud deployments due to security, performance disruption and accessibility. This includes migrating to the new SAP S/4HANA platform. The BOHH/Approyo partnership is reducing these setbacks.

Simon concludes:
By partnering together, Approyo and BOHH Labs can address customer demands and focus on what our enterprise, integrator and reseller customers need to secure access to their business-critical applications and data in the cloud with minimal disruption. The joint solution between Approyo and BOHH Labs is addressing the challenges enterprises face migrating to the cloud and enables SAP customers to leverage the analytics capabilities of SAP HANA, while gaining a secure method to easily access all enterprise systems to quickly find, search and unlock the value of all their data.

Why Data Access is the Heart of a Competitive Business

- Alan Jamieson, VP of Business Development at BOHH Labs

Businesses are evolving and starting to quickly realize that the data they retain has value to the company, but only if they can leverage it.  In fact, by 2020, some global analysts predict that data will be listed as a company asset, so it has significant monetary value. 

Some businesses already have a data-driven strategy that leverages its rich customer data assets to look for new revenues streams, business opportunities or use its machine performance data to improve efficiency through fewer machine breakdowns or to ensure that production is at its highest level that is already giving them competitive advantage.

Let’s reflect on Fortune 1000 companies over the last decade. Globally, our traditional Fortune 1000 companies are changing, and a significant percentage have fallen off the global stock markets or ceased trading, due to competition from newer entrants.  New online banks have set up business and are winning business from global banking organizations, as they offer more cost-effective services and are better able to understand their customers. New banking companies are looking for customers to use them for multiple services and customers, especially the younger generation, who expect more convenient and real-time 24-7 answers. Why does this matter?  Customer experience is a key business matrix. How customers interact and access their data is important for all parties and traditional banks are not always of the same thinking, or importantly, don’t have the technical systems to know their customer.  Additionally, newly formed companies don’t have legacy infrastructure to consider and are often more agile in their approach.

The greater knowledge businesses have access to through real-time interactions and many years of customer engagement, the greater analytical visibility they can gain on their customer or business operations, which helps make informed decisions on how you can extend or develop that relationship through new services and products.

It’s clear our global use of digital technologies, both in our consumer and work lives, is helping companies get more data on customers/users and their behaviors. The business world is starting to analyze those large volumes of data to drive greater customer and business insight. However, in our increasingly connected world, the variety of data – compliant, sensitive and confidential, plus the volume of data that is being produced, available, and perhaps more importantly, collected, is impacting and challenging many global companies. Data breaches are still occurring on a frequent basis and are a key security consideration in how data is accessed and protected today.

To handle today’s influx of structured and unstructured data, businesses use real-time data warehouses and often archive or store data over 12 months old to reduce its storage or operational costs. While data volumes are growing annually, the overall mix of data types creates the biggest challenge. How do you ensure that authorized users can access sensitive information like pricing, compliant data like Personal Identify Information (PII), Personal Health Information (PHI) and confidential corporate data, but other business users can do analytics on the overall dataset without seeing the protected data?

BOHH Labs has developed a solution that enables businesses to keep data access at the heart of driving competitive business with our Secure Data as a Service acting as a layer between the user/application and the back-end data, enabling total security on all your stored data. This helps to protect only the compliant or sensitive data fields that can only be accessed by specific users, while importantly enabling a wider business community of users to access the data for analytical purposes.  Making decisions using greater sets of data, helps to make more informed decisions through analytics. Secondly, as our service includes a secure conversational bot, we help companies who have an interest in customer self-service initiatives. Customers securely access data and authenticate through existing applications to access their specific information using voice as opposed to a keyboard, which improves user’s experience, customer services and drive competitive advantage.

A Market Overview on the Changing Data Landscape

- Alan Jamieson

We live in changing times and data has become a major part of our lives.  With the recent enactment of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in late May, we have all been inundated with privacy emails from our suppliers emphasizing that we own our data which helps both parties with relevant information, offers etc.

Having data and the rights to opt out are important, but how do we know it’s safe with ongoing, frequent data breaches across the globe? Can we cope with the number of offers sent to us from suppliers who hold our data, and can we be assured that they are using my current and historic personal data?  If data has been collected over weeks, months and even years, the reality is the more data you can analyze, the greater insight can be obtained.

A few years ago, data was expected to increase in volume by 100% annually, which challenged computing infrastructures and brought to light questions such as where is the most cost-effective place to store the data? And, what analytical tools should we be using? Can the tool look at all data types (structured and unstructured)? Do we need to hire data scientists looking to make real-time decisions? Are we aware that running complex queries take time? Today, most data volumes are increasing higher than previously predicted, especially in social media where data volumes can increase by Petabytes of data daily (not solely text but increasingly with video and audio content) and through our adoption of IoT products.

Terminology is also changing, terms such as big data. which had various means based on its context.  Gaining business insights from the increasing volumes of data being held are important to help improve user experiences, drive business efficiency, help fine tune marketing offers, and predict what equipment needs maintenance to avoid unnecessarily outages etc.

While we can protect data through encryption technologies either when data is at rest or in transit, searching for data in databases (on prem or in the cloud), repositories such as Microsoft SharePoint and other documentation types is also a critical challenge. It’s great to collect data but it you can't easily access it, you are incurring unnecessary storage business costs that will not be recovered.

Speaking to enterprise customers and global vendors, there is another change in how we interact with data.  With our widening generation employee bases across most enterprise companies, how we access data is changing.  Our younger global workforce, who have grown up with smartphones, are increasingly looking to request information or data via a voice request and not a keyboard.  Enterprise companies must cater for information or data access via keyboard and/or voice request but only to authorized data requestors. 

We at BOHH Labs address this changing data landscape with a service that provides voice and keyboard access to secure data enabling data analytics to be performed whilst importantly preventing data breaches. We are hoping to lead a shift in how the market both views and interacts with their data. After all, data is a business asset and we are looking to help companies unlock its value.

Security Add Ons Are Crap & Don't Protect Data

In the last couple of weeks, we have participated in several industry events, including the recent SAPPHIRENOW event hosted by SAP. I am a big supporter of these types of events as it is invaluable to be able to learn, share information, monitor market trends, and perhaps most importantly, speak with customers and have one-on-one conversations on what problems they need addressed and what they are currently lacking.

It is evident that organizations are looking to increase their value and maximize their technology investments by moving many business-critical applications to the Cloud. There are obvious benefits to this – cost savings, more efficiency in operations and enhanced ability to leverage analytics for more focused business decisions are just a few to name. However, to move all of this forward, customers are looking for new and innovative ways of protecting their critical business and data assets in our very volatile and breach-prevalent market. Security is challenging enterprise progression, and after attending several events recently, it is clear there is a discrepancy between the perception and reality by vendors on what customers actually want to fix this.

Companies and vendors continue putting out “new” solutions that are simply add ons to existing security investments, but it seems that customers are fed up with the security industry “add-ons” for promised enhanced security, as time and time again, the same old vendors are promising new and exciting solutions to protect companies and their data, yet major breaches keep happening.

I will be blunt – security add ons are crap. They are just a patch to stop bleeding so to speak, but they are not permanent solutions and they certainly are not innovative and new. Now, I am not saying that all current security solutions are crap, but we have had the current security practices for over a decade now, and while they have definitely worked in some cases, there are other well documented ones where they have blatantly not. This alone tells me that we need to re-evaluate how we are protecting our systems and data.

I am not saying that companies should stop purchasing specific security applications, CASB's, Firewalls, VPN's etc., but instead of bolstering the current systems with new patches and add ons, it is time that we ask ourselves if we are doing it right and providing enough trust and security to enable organizations to allow their customers to use that data correctly. Where we need to focus our security efforts is on the data itself, both at rest and in transport. The core focus must be on protecting the data at the foundation level.

Given that a business will easily spend millions to protect access to data, it would only make sense to secure the data itself as it comes through and sits in your database. But wait, you say we do that, right? Well yes, this happens with encryption, but there is a flaw - current database systems can encrypt stored data, but it is carried out in a way that anyone (human or machine) that has access to the system at any administration level generally also has access to the plain unencrypted data. This leaves a big come get me sign. That’s why at BOHH Labs we believe in offering database or specific field level security. All data that needs to be secured is removed from the source, encrypting it and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control over every data point. We do this because it stops the inside hacking job. If the database does not contain the data, then a malicious actor who has gained root or admin privileges cannot run a simple query on the data, extract it, and have it available to them to sell to whoever they like, unlike traditional TDE Data Encryption or homomorphic encryption technologies!

By putting our security focus on the data itself, not just where it is coming from, where it is stored or being transacted to, it enables better protection for both external and internal threats that customers desperately need.

Data Storage: From Then to Now & What’s Still Needed Ahead

- Becca Bauer

Data storage has in fact been around for hundreds of years and has gone through a number of changes before arriving at the cloud storage era we have currently arrived at. Starting in the 1720’s, punch cards were introduced and eventually became the first tool for data storage and recording. Since then data storage has gone through a radical evolution including the introduction of magnetic tape and then the first hard drive invented by IBM in 1956. This was followed some 20-30 years later by the introduction of floppy disks, CD-ROM and DVDs. Next, the USB flash drive arrived on the scene in 2000 and dominated storage from several years until cloud storage entered the market and was debuted by Amazon Web Services in the early 2000s and took a major hold in 2006. Since then, the use of the Cloud has become increasingly popular for data storage and brings us to the present-day climate.

While there are many clear benefits to moving the Cloud, there are also several flaws revealing themselves that indicate the storage market is in need of a continued evolution. For example, recent studies are indicating that moving storage from in-house to the Cloud won’t achieve cost savings unless the storage needs are fully assessed, and anticipated savings are planned out. In fact, over-estimating storage capacity is one area that can make a dent in the savings. While estimating a higher capacity can secure better cloud storage rates from vendors, if you don’t have enough data to meet this higher capacity, you are essentially paying for unnecessary and wasted space.

Another major challenge to the current cloud data storage model is data security. Most organizations turning to cloud storage solutions hold a mix of data that often includes sensitive and protected personal information in their databases that they have a responsibility to keep protected, such as PHI (Protected Health Information), PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and GDPR (Global Data Protection Regulation). Unfortunately, current database systems can encrypt stored data, but this encryption is carried out in a way that anyone (human or machine) that has access to the system at any administration level generally also has access to the plain unencrypted data. This design flaw leaves a “come get me” sign that has led to many diverse organizations becoming victims to data theft and losing millions of dollars.

So now that we have highlighted what is missing from the current cloud storage systems, what is the solution?

Enter BOHH Labs introducing the next phase of data storage, Secure Data as a Service (SDaaS) that puts a focus on both the actual security of the data and removes wasted spend with a storage consumption model. SDaaS acts as a layer between the user/application and the back-end data store and enables total security on all your stored data, without changing the data structure, while making certain data points visible only to those with the correct permissions. Whether this is in a database or a document, the BOHH SDaaS enables full use of data without the security concerns. This solution uniquely offers database or specific field level security that businesses desperately need. All data that needs to be secured is removed from the source, encrypting it and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control over sensitive data such as PHI, PII or GDPR. We do this because it stops the inside hacking job and it also enables companies can choose which data to store with full knowledge of data confidentiality/ sensitivity. This kills the flaws within the current storage market and enables stored data to be securely opened to the Cloud, without putting it at risk of breach.

All of this is done without impacting user accessibility and it is introducing secure storage as a consumption-based model, rather than the current

What’s the Point of Analytics if You Can’t Access Them?

- Becca Bauer, Director of Marketing & PR

In the workplace, data has become the golden ticket for companies to drive sales and stay competitive. However, much of the focus has been on the development of analytics and using data insights gathered on your marketing, sales, customers, products, new leads and so on to grow market share. All of this sounds good – hey it’s basically free marketing advice generated from your own information - but while this focus serves marketing and finance purposes, this emphasis fails to address the fundamental need of how we actually access those insights.

Big amounts of data is nothing new. It has always existed. Granted, not in such quantities as we have today with all of our applications and collaborative sharing tools, but document management has been holding a large amount of data since the 80s and email storage has been “big” ever since the late 90s. The onset of nonstop data being produced from everything from web history, emails and documents to contracts and CRM systems continues to grow daily, even hourly, enabling organizations to access corporate knowledge that is more relevant and targeted than ever. And as we move forward, there is no foreseeable end because we as a digital society produce a massive amount of data constantly that needs to be housed somewhere.

One major issue many companies are having is that they are looking to Cloud vendors and deployments to store historic or archived data in their infrastructure, as opposed to in the company’s own data center, and this often means recent data or even just 12-months old data get archived. The problem with this is, once the data is stored, how are companies easily able to access this data to extract business value or analytical insight to help businesses remain competitive? This is a big need! After all, how are companies supposed to take a targeted approach to their data and see if patterns emerge that can better be applied to high-value business decision to increase their bottom line if it is all archived and not easily accessible?

Access to data is the critical function here. Add to the fact that securely accessing stored data is an increasing challenge for companies, as often the data they want to examine contains confidential data such as PII (Personal Identifiable Information) and PHI (Personal Health Information), and it’s difficult for companies to guarantee the security of this sensitive data accessed by users.

So, what is the solution to putting your analytics and insights to use?

This is where BOHH Labs can step in and help. Our Secure Storage as A Service (SSaaS) acts as a layer between the user/application and the back-end data store and enables total security on all your stored data. This is done without changing the data structure, while making certain data points visible only to those with the correct permissions. Whether this is in a database or a document, the BOHH SSaaS solution enables full use of data without the security or accessibility concerns.

Our solution uniquely offers database or specific field level security. All data that needs to be secured is removed from the source, encrypting it and storing it separately without changing the structure, enabling prioritization and control over sensitive data such as PHI, PII or GDPR. If you know which data fields or rows contain sensitive data, companies can better protect these fields to ensure business compliance and enable data to be utilized by a wider audience to extract greater business value or insight, while still securing it and only providing access to those who have the correct privileges to see it.

As the enterprise market continues to become more digital and the amount of data we produce rapidly grows, it will be even more important that secure access to this data is simple. The ability to to manage your continually growing data and extracting more accurate results to deliver valuable analytics will be critical for businesses to stay competitive.

Post Industry Event POV: It’s Clear Customers Are Fed Up with New Security “Add-Ons”

BOHH Labs VP of Business shares his thoughts on BOHH's attendance at the GDS Security Summit.

Last week BOHH Labs attended GDS’s Security Summit in Atlanta, GA.  The summit was well attended with CISO’s and VP’s of Security from global enterprise accounts in the finance, healthcare, manufacturing sectors etc.

It was evident that global enterprise accounts across all market sectors are looking for innovative ways of protecting their critical business and data assets.  The desire to move from data center to cloud is prevalent and often cost driven but mitigating the risk of data breaches is the main obstacle to be overcome by organizations. Additionally, as part of the discussion on security challenges, there is an increasing need to avoid further data breaches and meet new compliance regulations as Friday May 25, 2018 is fast approaching when the new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) becomes effective and impacts all global customers with European Union (EU) member customers.

One thing was made very clear: Companies and customers have been searching for new solutions and are keen to avoid buying another security solution that is layered on existing security investments. They are fed up with the security industry “add-ons” for promised enhanced security. The same old vendors are promising new and exciting solutions to protect companies and their data, yet time after time major breaches keep happening.

BOHH Labs was honored to take part in this industry discussion and present its new solution to help address the security challenges plaguing customers and organizations alike. We were delighted with the reaction to our new Secure Storage as a Service (SSaaS), which enables companies to protect compliant and confidential data fields while importantly enabling analytical insights to be gained without the risk of a data breach.

We demonstrated our service on a cloud platform to highlight how our solution is platform agnostic and show how compliant plus non-compliant data residing in a Hadoop data platform could be searched for analytical insights and the compliant data (i.e. PII, PHI) fields only being accessed by authorized users.

Seldom has the BOHH Labs team comprising of Simon Bain – CEO, Ken Hawkins – CTO and Alan Jamieson – VP Business Development seen such a positive and enthusiastic reaction to new technology.  Perhaps it was showing the Secure Storage as a Service working on a cloud platform and accessing data in a Hadoop data platform that validated how powerful and importantly how relevant our service is?  We left the summit upbeat with our message and solution resonating with most of the
conference attendees.

All in all it was a great industry event and if you want proof and to learn more, contact us and we will be happy to place a POC on your storage system, to show how we secure, scale and enable easy access to your valuable information stores.

Least-Privilege Security – Why and How

- Greg Gray, BOHH Labs Senior Software Engineer

Your users only need access to the resources they need to do their jobs. It’s a pretty simple concept that’s been a best-practice for many years. Simple in concept, not so simple in execution.

To make this concept work, I believe there are three areas where least-privilege security must be implemented: users, applications, and processes. Below we will take a deeper diver into each one.

Users
Users are given access to machines (e.g., their workstations) from which they perform their jobs. In many corporate environments, users are not given the privilege to install software. The applications they are allowed to run might also be controlled. Even access to some areas of the local file system might be necessarily restricted to maintain the integrity of the running machine.

Software developers typically need access to their own workstations and remote databases and servers. Since many of these needs are project-based, the privileges should be given to get the project done, then revoked when the privileges are no longer needed. This revoking of privileges is often missed, giving some users, who have worked on many projects, access to many more resources than they need to do their jobs at any one point in time and the opportunity to misuse data they have access to but should not.

System administrators need access to systems at a high-level of privilege, but does each administrator need access to all systems at that level?  In the smaller environments, probably yes, but for large environments, with a larger number of administrators, some narrowing of the privilege scope is probably warranted and ultimately a best practice when it comes to security.

The disgruntled employee with privileges to many systems is a danger to the company’s assets should this person be fired. A protocol needs to be established for quickly removing the privileges of this employee if needed.

Applications and Processes
Applications need privileges to access file systems, local databases, and remote databases and systems. Sometimes privileges are given to an application early in the development life-cycle that might not be needed later in the development life-cycle.

These privileges should be pared as needed so the application doesn’t go into production with unnecessarily liberal access to certain database resources or other company resources. If the application doesn’t create or drop tables, then the application shouldn’t have that privilege. There may also be different roles for users of an application. A role that only does reporting probably doesn’t need data modification privileges.

User Privileges
Implement Centralized Login:
The first thing that needs to be done to get control of user accounts and privileges is to establish a centralized login system. In a Microsoft Windows environment, this usually begins with the Active Directory Domain Services. In a Linux/Unix environment, an LDAP server can provide for central management of logins and permissions. An Active Directory service can also act as an LDAP server for Linux/Unix environments.

Active Directory Domain Services actually encompass multiple services that can be used for privilege management and maintenance:

• Domain Services – Provides authentication and centralized storage for users and data. Also provides search functions.
• Lightweight Directory Services – Provides for directory-enabled applications using the LDAP  protocol.
• Directory Federation Services – Provides single-sign-on (SSO) to authenticate users to multiple applications and devices.
• Certificate Services – Provides for the creation, distribution and management of secure certificates.

Kerberos is an authentication protocol that uses the concept of tickets to allow machines communicating over an insecure network to provide proof of identity. Kerberos is commonly used for SSO in Linux/Unix environments, but Microsoft also has a Kerberos system available.

Centralized login systems aren’t just for users. Applications and Databases can use them, too. As an example, MySQL Enterprise can be setup to use Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM) to authenticate using an LDAP, Kerberos, or other authentication source. Other systems can use Kerberos without PAM.

Establish Policies
Once a central login system is established, policies need to be established that outline what is permissible for each user, application, and process. Users will probably have a blanket policy that covers all users for access to their workstations, email servers, etc. System administrators will have their own policy that extends their permissions for their unique role in the security realm.

Applications and Processes will have their own unique policies that will likely vary from application to application. Database permissions for software developers will have phases where the beginning of the projects will allow more permissive access while the permissions might disappear altogether after the application is in production. The application must also have a documented policy for appropriate permissions for it to perform its functions. These varying permissions can be grouped into roles and assigned to each user as needed. The centralized login system can store and manage these roles.

Audit
Perhaps the most important actions to take for least-privilege policies is auditing the systems to ensure that the policies are being enforced. Audits should be scheduled on a regular basis in addition to having a few surprise audits. Auditing not only ensures that the policies are being enforced but also reminds the user community what the policies are and that the policies are important to the company.

Automation
Least-Privilege Security management is not an easy task. In small organizations it could probably be managed by a small number of people (at least two) but in larger organizations, the task becomes onerous. Luckily, there are a number of third party products that can provide automated services to bolster your privilege management efforts. These services run the full gamut, from automated probing of systems looking for vulnerabilities, to performing the necessary audits to ensure policy compliance.

It is not our aim to promote any third-party products so, using your favorite search engine, search for “least privilege security” for a list of such products.

Least-Privilege Security has a vital role in protecting your company’s systems and resources, in other words: your company’s bottom line. Users need clear policies to outline what is expected of them. Application developers need clear policies to ensure a secure environment in which to run their applications and access their databases. These policies need to be enforced to ensure there are no holes in the systems or in the policies themselves. Finally, verifying the policies are being used as intended via audit is the final necessary step to securing and protecting your company’s resources.

Stop Throwing Away Money on Data Storage (Even When Moving it to the Cloud)

- Alan Jamieson, BOHH Labs VP of Business Development

Does moving your data center storage to the Cloud (Private/Hybrid) help with saving operational costs on increasingly challenged IT budgets?  For most people, this is an automatic answer, yes; however, recent studies are indicating that moving storage from in-house to the Cloud won’t achieve cost savings unless the storage needs are fully assessed, and anticipated savings are planned out. This is alarming, and you may ask why?

Firstly, capacity planning is an issue: how much do we need today and in 12 months’ time?  Over-estimating storage capacity is one area that can make a dent in the savings. While estimating a higher capacity can secure better cloud storage rates from vendors, if you don’t have enough data to meet this higher capacity, you are essentially paying for unnecessary and wasted space.

Secondly, while over 80% of data centers have the storage capacity in-house, it is difficult to do routine checks, so when looking to switch and invest in Cloud storage, companies often don’t have the whole picture and can be making a choice that is often not financially beneficial. The fixed costs (electricity, cooling, licenses and maintenance) of running a data center and any spare storage or processing capacity is often overlooked when formulating your cloud migration/deployment strategy.

The volume and variety (structured and unstructured, regulated data etc.) we are collecting is increasingly on an annual basis.  Data is now seen as a business asset with new Chief Data Officer roles in enterprise accounts being created, but are we realizing the value of the data assets we have?

From research done by Jonathan Koomey in late 2017, only 25% of companies would save money if they transferred their server data directly onto the Cloud, whereas 75% would see an increase in annual costs. However, all the sample group would save if the companies migrated after quantifying out how much server space they need. This unnecessary Cloud storage spends costs companies around the world an estimated $62 billion annually.

If we step back from the cost of storage, the other important and increasing challenge for global companies is extracting the value from data that is stored in the Cloud and often is not accessible.  With the massive amount of data being produced daily, operational cost challenges are pushing companies to store data over 12 months or even more recent too soon. The world has become analytically focused; however, insight is only gained when data over a significant number of years is analyzed to extract the insight to achieve greater operational efficiencies, greater insight in how to retain your customers and how to improve the quality of manufactured parts.

Another research report puts the cost of Cloud waste at about 35%. So, for every dollar spent on Cloud resources, you only get $0.65 investment value. Now that we have addressed how companies are losing money, below are six ways your company/department can alleviate some of the wasted

Cloud spend:

1. Identify and retire abandoned applications – why store what is no longer needed?
2. Choose the right storage model – What is needed today and plan.
3.  Right-size instances – Invest in only what is needed.
4. Perform licensing audits – Do your software vendors enable your licenses to be used in the Cloud at no extra cost?
5. Automate server usage for peak/off peak hours – only pay the Cloud provider for services that are needed.
6. Pay upfront – Looking at license options could save more than purely monthly subscription fees.

While the global market is focused on enhancing how data is stored and embracing the benefits of making a transition to the Cloud, having a clear idea of want storage is needed and how often you need to access your data will ensure that you select the most cost-effective model for your business.