IT data management concerns

LogLogic announced the findings to an IT Data Management survey carried out amongst 164 IT managers and directors.

The research aims to establish how IT data is being managed and utilised within UK organizations.

Key findings:

• Only 14 percent of survey respondents could say that they highly trusted the quality of their IT data and had no concerns. Staggering then that 81 percent said they used their IT data for compliance purposes.
• A huge 41 percent admitted that they couldn’t readily access all of their IT data and 48 percent added that it wasn’t in the right, useable format.
• 49 percent said that they couldn’t easily create reports. Confirming this, the research found that only 16.2 percent could create IT data reports in real time, 25 percent would take longer than five hours (and 13 percent of those estimating it taking longer than 24 hours).
• Of those who could create reports and insights from their IT data, only 26 percent said they were actionable.
• 43 percent don’t use their IT data to help manage service level agreements and 44 percent don’t use it for operational planning either.
• 36 percent of respondents estimate that less than 49 percent of the IT data that they need to need to report on and analyse is available to them and accessible for compliance, security or operational intelligence purposes.

“It’s clear from the findings that organisations are taking a tactical rather than strategic approach to IT data management,” said Guy Churchward, CEO at LogLogic. “For example, security and compliance were listed as the key reasons for viewing/using IT data (81 and 73 percent respectively) – activities the business has to carry out to protect itself. Only 32 percent saw IT data as a productivity tool and seven percent even admitted that their IT data was completely ignored and unused. The situation is further compounded by the fact that a high percentage of organisations have data quality and trust concerns.”

He continued: “Our research found that only 19.8 percent of c’level directors are currently asked to review IT data. This drops to 13 percent when the same question is asked of their board directors. This will however change in due course as IT data warehousing and management becomes the crux of IT decision-making and CIOs and IT managers assess their ability to implement modern computing models in the enterprise.

Current IT infrastructures have grown into a chaos of applications, agents and devices that generate an increasing amount of IT data. This data provides a wealth of information on how systems are being used, how they are performing, where to drive efficiencies, and how to meet compliance mandates and increase security.