#104 – Creating a Data Management Strategy with Paul Stringfellow

This week, Chris talks to Paul Stringfellow, Technical Director at Gardner Systems, about the process of creating a data management strategy.  As we adopt additional, sometimes disparate services from SaaS and IaaS vendors, increasingly businesses are seeing their data being dispersed across multiple platforms.  With such a valuable asset at their fingertips, how do businesses go about building a strategy for storing, managing and securing their information?

The conversation starts with a look at three layers – physical infrastructure, smart storage management and data management.  Storage platforms are pretty fully functional these days, so features like APIs, protocol support and data services are “table stakes”.  Vendors need to provide these as standard and most generally do.

What about the public cloud?  How as this changed the perception of data management?  As a storage medium, cloud is a great resource, but comes with a different charging model.  Businesses need to be sure that data in the cloud is being stored for some current or future value.  Otherwise, recurring costs can be expensive.

What are the steps to building a data strategy?  The initial focus is identification, a challenge in modern businesses, where data can be spread across sources including on-premises and cloud infrastructure.  Owners need to be identified and requirements collected.  This needs to be used as the basis for technology selection.  This includes looking at the wider aspects of application architecture.

You can find Paul on the Twitters at @techstringy and at www.techstringy.com.  His podcast (Tech Interviews) is online at podcast.techstringy.com and SoundCloud.

Elapsed Time: 00:41:22

Timeline

• 00:00:00 – Intros
• 00:02:00 – Three layers, physical infrastructure, storage and data management
• 00:02:40 – Is storage hardware good enough these days?
• 00:04:30 – Table stakes – protocols, APIs, data services
• 00:06:34 – What is the impact on (public) cloud in a data strategy?
• 00:09:00 – Is public cloud being used tactically for data management?
• 00:10:30 – Does public cloud change behaviour in retaining data?
• 00:13:30 – Cloud changes the storage cost focus from every 5 years to every 4 weeks
• 00:18:00 – What are the steps to build data management strategy? Start with Audit
• 00:20:40 – Identifying data is harder than ever, with on-prem, cloud and SaaS services
• 00:25:30 – Who owns the responsibility of managing business data and policies?
• 00:28:30 – Data is your <insert valuable resource here> of information
• 00:30:16 – What components go into a data platform?
• 00:35:39 – CIOs/CTOs need to look at application architecture as part of a data strategy
• 00:38:45 – Everybody loves shiny
• 00:40:00 – Wrap Up

Related Podcasts & Blogs

• #103 – Data Management and DataOps with Hitachi Vantara (Sponsored)
• #81 – Storage or Data Asset Management?
• Software Defining Your Storage

Podcast: Play in new window | Download