Working in uncertain socio-economic conditions is pressurising South African companies to differentiate themselves even more to achieve vital business growth. Part of this entails ensuring they can meet the hyper-availability demands of the digital age. How far along the road to data availability are local businesses?

But before one can look at the state of readiness, it is advisable to examine what hyper-availability entails. It is all about taking data at the organisation to the next level. Hyper-availability enables the delivery of actionable insights to allow businesses to increase productivity and innovate faster. In doing so, they can offer new digital services that improve how people live and work. In this environment, data must move to a new state of intelligence that can automatically anticipate need and meet demand.

This more intelligent way of performing data management is not just about analysing what lies in the corporate back-end. It is about integrating data with all systems to drive a new awareness in terms of its potential. An integral part of this is automating the process. However, for automation to bring benefits, local business must evolve their data from being policy-driven to becoming more behaviour-driven.

In this way, hyper-availability can leverage current advances such as artificial intelligence and machine-learning.

Meeting deliverables

One of the advantages of embracing hyper-availability is that companies respond faster to any business need. Not only can they extract valuable insight from their data, but they can also significantly improve efficiencies across operations. And since data has become an indispensable tool for any enterprise today, it does not matter what industry sector the company focuses on, hyper-availability can provide competitive advantage.

As much as gaining insight and streamlining operations are beneficial, the digital business landscape requires more if stakeholders are to view the organisation as truly different. That is why hyper-availability empowers decision-makers to deliver new digital services they would not previously have considered.

For South African businesses, having access to actionable insights delivered in such a way to add to competitive advantage means they can focus more on strategic delivery and less on data management.

Consumers and business customers have become increasingly resistant to those organisations unable to deliver products and services tailored for their needs.

Intelligence applied differently

Hyper-availability is therefore more than just a business continuity or disaster recovery add-on. It is the means to drive business change and develop bespoke solutions based on data analysis. Intelligent data management underpins this approach and optimises the value to be gained from data.

Data is the driving force behind identifying new market opportunities and understanding what existing customers require. Not having access to it means a business quickly loses relevancy to those who can. But just accessing data is not good enough. This is where intelligent data management comes to the foreground. Considering how much data is available to manage, it should not be surprising that abusing (or rather mismanaging) is a very real risk.

Embracing a hyper-availability strategy mitigates this to an extent but decision-makers still need to embrace all its tenets.

South African companies are in a prime position to take what is happening in other parts of the world and adding a uniquely African spin to it, given the level of innovation occurring in addressing infrastructure challenges. Hyper-availability should form part of this.

By Kate Mollett, regional manager for South Africa at Veeam.