The autonomous leap: Extract more business value from your data

With built-in AI or ML algorithms to manage itself, a self-driving system can help businesses reduce costs and enhance productivity, enabling manpower optimisation and resource allocation towards higher value tasks

Updated: Dec 20, 2019 12:10:10 PM UTC
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Image: Shutterstock

Did you know humans now generate an estimated 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day? More data has been created in the last couple of years as compared to data created in all of human history! How can businesses cope with this data flood and use it to their advantage?

In the data-driven economy, businesses around the world are struggling to unlock more strategic value from their data. The sheer volume of data and its exponential growth is making its management complicated. To manage this demands a high level of responsibility. Unplanned downtime affects nearly 82 percent of businesses, according to an industry report and costs approximately $260,000 per hour, with the average expense of a data breach topping $3.5 million.

However, as cyber attacks rise in sophistication, dedicating more people to manage this problem is neither efficient nor guarantees success. The nature of 24/7 requirements for a business amidst a rising threat landscape means that ‘manual’ management isn’t an option anymore.

Accelerating innovation via AI or ML and automation Digital businesses require a new approach to harness the full power of their data. With artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and automation as a strategic combination, businesses will be able to manage and extract greater value from their information more easily. One technology that’s helping businesses unlock unprecedented value is the autonomous database.

Making the autonomous leap
Powered by advanced AI or ML and next-generation cloud services, an autonomous database offers you self-driving, self-securing and self-repairing capabilities, thereby providing unprecedented performance, extremely high availability, and unparalleled security, while also helping reduce human errors.

With built-in AI or ML algorithms to manage itself, a self-driving system can help businesses reduce costs and enhance productivity, enabling manpower optimisation and resource allocation towards higher value tasks. With self-securing capabilities, the database would be able to automatically apply security patches near real time and fend off external attacks by automatically encrypting data, dramatically lowering risks. Further, an autonomous database is much more reliable, with its self-repairing capabilities; because the system constantly monitors, regulates its own operation and behaviour, ensuring that processes run smoothly all the time. This reduces both planned as well as unplanned downtime significantly, which otherwise could cost a business nearly 0.2 percent of its revenue.

Democratising innovation
Imagine if IT teams didn’t have to spend hours and hours on database ‘maintenance' tasks such as patching, tuning, securing, managing databases. Instead, they could apply their creativity and focus on higher value activities, like refining data architecture, better securing the external data sources, as well as making sure the business is ensuring the best possible use of data, the new currency in the digital economy. That way, innovation wouldn’t be confined to just a few great minds and you’d be empowering more minds to unleash their creativity. This could also boost employee morale, giving them a break from the mundane.

Advantage: Early adopters
As with any new technology, early adopters stand to gain an edge over their peers. An apt testimony would be this prediction piece by Forrester: Businesses that use AI, big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) to uncover new business insights “will steal $1.2 trillion per annum from their less informed peers by 2020.”

Why it’s time to act now
Similar to the time value of money (TVM), reaping early value from technology that’s available now has the potential to be worth much more than the same amount in future, because of the advantage it offers users in the present time.

With more data getting generated every single day, the pressure on businesses to make the most of their available data will only increase. Database management will become even more vital, and emerging technology paradigms like autonomous will soon become the norm as they help businesses accelerate innovation and drive exponential growth for the business.

Are you ready to give your IT team the autonomous edge?

Amitav Kanungo is senior general manager (Technical) at Global Project Delivery & Support, Comviva and Ajay Ahuja is senior director, Solution Engineering Hub at Oracle India

The thoughts and opinions shared here are of the author.

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