White Paper Effective Data Capital Creation Requires Scalable, Flexible Data Storage and Protection Infrastructure Sponsored by: Dell EMC and Intel Eric Burgener April 2019 IDC OPINION As companies undergo digital transformation (DX), they are moving to new business models that recognize data as a key strategic asset to power applications and drive business decisions. To achieve this, it is necessary to transform the data that organizations collect and manage into a valuable capital asset referred to as "data capital." Traditional information technology (IT) infrastructure and workloads are not designed to drive data capital creation. The scale of data that must be captured, stored, protected, and made available for use, as well as the needs of the next-generation applications (NGAs) that IT organizations develop to drive data capital creation, goes beyond the capabilities of traditional infrastructure in the areas of performance, scalability, availability, flexibility, and manageability. To meet these more stringent requirements, most companies undertake an IT transformation (ITX) during their DX journey, modernizing infrastructure by updating primary storage, adding to or enhancing unstructured storage platforms, and investing in associated data protection. There is a strong correlation between those organizations that emphasize security, automation, hybrid cloud, and the use of modern storage infrastructure and the ability to create and effectively leverage data capital to drive positive business results. Companies need to keep this in mind as they purchase new or refresh existing storage and data protection infrastructure because not all IT vendors offer an infrastructure portfolio that includes these capabilities. As a well-established, leading IT vendor with a broad storage and data protection portfolio, Dell EMC solutions powered by Intel Xeon Scalable processors offer its customers the solutions and technologies that support efficient data capital creation. IN THIS WHITE PAPER The move to data-centric business models is geared to enable organizations to turn their data into data capital. Because of the more stringent performance, scalability, availability, flexibility, and management requirements of the data-centric model, these organizations must modernize their storage and data protection infrastructure through the process of IT transformation. This white paper defines data capital, describes how boosting data capital is a critical ingredient for competitive differentiation, and discusses the implications for data storage and data protection infrastructure. It then turns to an overview of the Dell EMC storage and data protection portfolio, exploring the benefits these solutions offer to organizations interested in crafting the most effective infrastructure to maximize the value of data capital. April 2019, IDC #US45002519 SITUATION OVERVIEW DX is the comprehensive transformation of business and organizational models to fully leverage evolving digital technologies and their impact across society in a strategic manner. DX is underway in most industries today, and modernized data storage and data protection infrastructure is a requirement for successful DX. With DX, the effective collection and use of data become critical to improving customer experience, defining new products and services, identifying new markets, uncovering business insights, and managing all aspects of the business. Digital platforms are a critical revenue source for many businesses, but even organizations that aren't using technology for direct revenue generation are digitizing internal processes to improve efficiency, save costs, and drive better overall business outcomes. With DX, data becomes a key strategic resource. Successful companies will be the ones that can most effectively transform their data into data capital. Data capital is organizational wealth in the form of value derived from a company's data, and it is created by the realization that data is a capital asset. Data generates value when it is leveraged in workflows, powers applications, drives product and service delivery, and reveals insights through analytics. For these companies, the strategic nature of this data capital makes protecting data a paramount concern. There is a deluge of data expected over the next several years — IDC predicts that by 2025, the global datasphere (the amount of data captured per year) will grow to 163ZB (a zettabyte is a billion terabytes). Companies will be challenged to not only manage and protect data on this massive scale but also extract its value in a timely manner to turn it into data capital. The risk of failure is high. The ability to manage, protect, and utilize data at this scale has significant implications for IT infrastructure. Requirements around performance, capacity expansion, availability, protection, ease of management, and cost are changing, and all of these will have to be managed at a scale that far exceeds what the typical IT organization is used to. Turning this wealth of data into data capital will drive the deployment of many NGAs specifically designed for this, which will put new demands on data storage and data protection infrastructure. DX is driving the need for ITX to meet new requirements, and that has significant implications for how IT organizations implement new IT infrastructure going forward. ITX Alters the IT Agenda Top motivators for ITX projects include the digitization of existing processes and workflows as well as the introduction of IT, cloud, and automation infrastructure that can better handle the scale and growth requirements of data capture, storage, and delivery; data protection; and big data and analytics. Security is in fact the most common project driving spending in IT infrastructure hardware (although not the biggest motivator of ITX projects). With the advent of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe, and the changes that is expected to drive, compliance is another key concern and a challenge that becomes much greater as organizations collect and work with data on a massive scale. Recent worldwide IDC research with Fortune 2000 companies across all vertical markets pinpoints the primary motivators of ITX projects (see Figure 1). Making better use of cloud computing leads ITX project motivators, offering opportunities to streamline on-premises infrastructure, increase agility, and lower costs for certain workloads. Better enabling the use of data analytics and the business insights it can drive is the second most popular objective, and ©2019 IDC #US45002519 2 the use of related technologies like the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), and real-time streaming analytics is soaring: ▪ 49.2% of organizations have already deployed IoT technology, 30.2% are currently evaluating the technology, and 12.5% will consider IoT in the next 12 months. Among other uses, the better instrumentation that IoT provides for existing processes and workflows enables users to be more efficiently optimized as conditions evolve and can also drive lower costs for ongoing maintenance and resulting products and services. ▪ 32.2% of organizations have deployed workloads that leverage AI/ML, 34.1% are currently evaluating AI/ML, and 23.0% will consider using these technologies in the next 12 months. These methods not only allow organizations to better analyze and understand what has happened with the business in the past but also identify opportunities for improvements and provide a better ability to predict what will happen in the future. ▪ With real-time streaming analytics (which in many cases demands extremely high- performance storage infrastructure), 44.2% of organizations are using it today, 31.5% are evaluating it, and 18.2% will consider its use in the next 12 months. IDC has predicted that by 2020, 60–70% of the Fortune 2000 companies will have at least one real-time big data and analytics workload that they also consider mission critical to their business. FIGURE 1 Primary Motivators in ITX Projects Make better use of cloud computing 32.1% Better data analytics and insight 30.6% Automate IT service delivery 27.0% Improve operational processes 26.8% Improve personnel efficiency/productivity 26.5% Improve customer satisfaction 26.0% Improve business continuance/application availability 24.0% Reduce infrastructure costs 23.3% Improve agility/time to market for new projects 18.9% Standardize infrastructure reference architecture 17.1% Improve project time to market 16.8% Don't know 0.0% 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 (% of respondents) n = 1,040 Base = all respondents Notes: This survey is managed by IDC's Quantitative Research Group. Data is weighted by country GDP. Multiple responses were allowed.. Use caution when interpreting small sample sizes. Source: IDC and Dell EMC's Data Protection for IT Transformation Survey, 2018 ©2019 IDC #US45002519 3 All of these changes are driving what data is collected and stored, how the data is protected, what types of applications are being developed, and what strategies and processes are put in place to turn the data into data capital. The infrastructure that is deployed to address performance, scalability, availability, and compliance requirements will have a substantial impact on an organization's ability to drive innovation. This change presents both a challenge and an opportunity for companies. Some companies will flourish, turning the influx of data into competitive differentiation. Others will be overwhelmed in a struggle