Harvesting intelligence from data—and converting that intelligence into productive financial risk-transfer decisions—is a key element of how capital markets firms both provide value to their clients and protect their own interests. To date, however, few firms are optimizing the conversion of raw data into actionable analytics to satisfy competitive and regulatory forces.
Capital markets firms must evolve storage strategies in terms of speed, scalability, efficiency, and the sophistication of analytics output to accommodate rising data performance requirements. A more stringent regulatory climate, long-term demographic trends, and new technologies are fundamentally changing the investment landscape and giving rise to new software-driven business models.
Meanwhile, insatiable demand for new data sources and the growth in data creation continue unabated. Unrelenting capacity demands and ever-shrinking backup windows put increased pressure on storage managers to find ways to improve utilization, performance and efficiency from both installed and new systems.
Amid a new fundamental business climate, more firms are recognizing the need for improved data management. Voluntary and imposed regulatory mandates have made governance, risk and compliance (GRC) use cases top priorities. These are closely followed by projects that improve return on data assets (RDA) and reduce both capex and opex.
In this free report, Tech-Tonics explores evolving storage strategies that can help resource constrained capital markets firms follow secular trends in computing while balancing needs against costs amid a changing market environment. As is common with technology investments, the decision to evolve storage strategy will depend on a number of factors: legacy architecture, spectrum of applications, user needs, budget and politics.
The Road Ahead
The principal objectives of any comprehensive storage strategy are to optimize resource utilization, workload performance, user experience and costs to maximize return on investment (ROI). The key to achieving these objectives is better understanding the value of various data.
In response to these challenges, capital markets firms are consolidating data silos and placing greater emphasis on unifying data management. New data storage solutions are modernizing data management for increasingly complex and hybridized environments, particularly given the growing adoption of virtualized and cloud-based architectures.
Automated tiering, solid-state, virtual appliances, and primary storage deduplication are among the “must-haves” for the road ahead. Coupled with cloud and Hadoop, these solutions maximize storage utilization, improve application performance and user experience, and facilitate deeper analytics to drive better/faster decision making while lifting ROI.
Conclusion
Amid the current hype around topics like software-defined storage, hyperconverged systems and virtual machine-aware storage, Tech-Tonics recommends that storage administrators focus on solutions that complement their current storage infrastructure, but allow them to gradually shift human capital from managing storage infrastructure to managing data.
We also believe that capital markets firms should start thinking of all of their data as big data. This applies to data residing in legacy systems or newer cloud-based architectures; it makes no difference whether data is internally generated or sourced from a third-party provider.
A more holistic approach that breaks down data silos across different IT teams and departments is the path to assuring service delivery, gaining deeper systems and customer insights and improving operational efficiency. Tech-Tonics believes that by focusing on the value of data, capital markets firms of all shapes and sizes can evolve their storage strategies and achieve their principal objective: optimizing the balance between needs and costs.
Download the free report here.
