The hidden data challenges CIOs face on their quest to accelerate business outcomes

In the quest to minimize mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR), CIOs are often confronted with what we like to refer to as “data challenges.” You can either make use of this data and it can propel you on your quest to business outcomes, or it just sits there on the side of the trail, not doing a whole lot. Organizations' systems constantly churn out diverse data streams of logs, metrics, application traces, security events, and application profiles. These are reservoirs of valuable insights — provided your teams have the capacity to effectively manage and interpret them.

One major obstacle in this process is the existence of data silos. These isolated pockets of information across departments or systems can obstruct real-time issue detection and resolution. Compounding the issue, inconsistencies in data, inaccurate application profiles, and lags in real-time data analysis can inflate MTTD and MTTR and make it difficult to achieve operational resilience. A lack of data contextualization and integration can hinder the visibility required for quick issue identification and resolution.

When tasked with improving customer experiences, CIOs typically associate it with analyzing customer data to provide better services. However, that isn’t the only angle you should be focusing on. For instance, effective data management and information discovery helps to ensure that customers can swiftly locate the information they need. Disorganization or inaccessibility of data can frustrate customers and disrupt their experiences.

Similarly, safeguarding the data entrusted by your customers is a job in and of itself when improving customer experiences. It necessitates robust data security measures and practices. But, challenges like inefficient data management, outdated security protocols, and a lack of end-to-end encryption can complicate this effort.

In the domain of security risk mitigation, data remains a critical beacon. Your systems are continuously generating security event data which, when monitored and analyzed appropriately, enables proactive threat prevention. Obstacles like scattered or unstandardized data lag in real-time analysis, and outdated security infrastructure can make threat detection an impossible task. 

Beyond just detecting cyber threats, however, another way to achieve effective defenses requires advanced data encryption, regular audits, and stringent data access controls — aspects that can be compromised by a lack of awareness about the latest cyber threats and defenses. Again all of this boils down to data and being able to securely access it in real time.

Addressing these data challenges may not be an easy task, but it’s a necessary one on your quest to improve operational resilience, customer experience, and security risk management. By tackling these underlying data challenges with the right tools, you will likely find that there were hidden opportunities in your data that you previously missed. 

By using a solution that can process and correlate data from different environments in real time, you will be able to pinpoint the root cause of an outage, accurately give customers what they’re looking for, detect security threats, and so much more. When your data is connected through workflows, you can seamlessly transform all of your data into outcomes, in real time.

The journey onward includes dismantling data silos through a flexible architecture, decreases in data discrepancies and blind spots through connected workflows, and quick time to results through processing times that take seconds, not hours.  

Embark on your journey to unlock the full potential of your organization’s data. Download our guide to putting your data to work to mitigate security risks, enhance operational resilience, and uplift customer experiences.