SOLUTION BRIEF
Does Your Data Center Know What BI Is? The Problem with Old BI
77%
of CIOs believe analytics and business intelligence will have the greatest impact on organizations during the next two years.1 – Deloitte
According to the news source, legacy BI systems have a fatal flaw that makes them almost irrelevant in the modern enterprise. That flaw boils down to the concept of silos. Traditionally, IT and business operations have been built around dedicated silos in which different teams operated. Various technologies were similarly split, allowing everything to be more manageable as each key group within an organization operated at a small scale. Similarly, IT would have leaders devoted to network systems, databases, security, system administration, the help desk and other tasks.
A Data Center Knowledge story analyzing this study explained that the emphasis on business intelligence is somewhat bittersweet.2 On one hand, it’s great to see that CIOs recognize the value potential of BI and are working to ramp up their investments. On the other, BI has been shown as a priority in studies like this since 2006. It’s been a decade and BI is still a top concern, why is that?
BI technologies were initially designed with these silos in mind. The report explained that BI teams would operate as their own entity, divided from the rest of the business, and work to analyze data from various sources to deliver value for specific user groups. The result was even more silos than existed in the first place as BI data became isolated into various compartments. Modern enterprises are breaking silos down, and BI strategies must be transformed to allow for more user input, greater flexibility and the ability to support decentralized enterprise organizational structures. At the same time, governance is still as important as ever.
The report explained that the problem facing businesses is actually somewhat straightforward legacy BI tools can’t keep up with the demands of the modern enterprise, creating a situation in which consistent upgrades and advances are necessary.
All of this adds up to major challenges in the data center, as managers must eliminate the BI silos between different technology units and find ways to unify information to get a more robust view of everyday operations.
Continued on next page
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SOLUTION BRIEF Does Your Data Center Know What BI Is? (continued)
Is Your Data Center in Tune with Modern BI? Gleaning value from BI in the modern data center hinges on being able to connect disparate data workflows to get a feel for how various systems interact with one another. The reality is that data center barriers are breaking down. Network traffic is moving more and more data between systems than ever, a stark contrast from a traditional emphasis on getting data from systems out to end users. Organizations are increasingly working to move storage data closer to apps to improve performance. Big data is unifying many storage and compute capabilities to drive advanced analytics.
The modern data center is increasingly a place without silos, begging the question - Does your data center team have a clear understanding of what modern BI looks like? Here are some traits to look for as you work to update your BI capabilities: • The ability to bring together data from diverse sources, including Internet of Things devices, to monitor the facility as a whole. • T he capacity to automatically analyze trends in data from throughout the facility to notify managers of situations that require attention. • The breadth of monitoring needed to track data workflows across server, network and storage environments.
These are just a few attributes of modern BI systems in the data center. Learning Tree can offer a full set of courses to help your staff delve deep into how modern BI systems work and what they can do to contribute to more stable and efficient data centers.
CA1608 DataCtrBISB
Sources: 1 http://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/at/Documents/technology-media-telecommunications/cio-survey2015.pdf 2 http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/03/24/no-country-legacy-bi/
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