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December - 2015 - issue > CIO Insights

Using Data Analytics for Loss Prevention

Jonathan Lowsley, CIO, ADrive
Thursday, December 3, 2015
 Jonathan Lowsley, CIO, ADrive
Headquartered in California, ADrive offers innovative suite of secure solutions to store, backup, share, access and edit files on the internet and help the enterprise customers to protect their business valuable data.

When looking at any business there are key performance indicators that measure the success of the company. Across verticals a variety of metrics specific to the industry are used to gauge performance, however, profitability could be considered the universal metric of success and the primary defining factor of business performance.

While the obvious way to increase this performance is to increase revenue, the flipside of reducing cost is just as important. Every CxO focuses on operating within a budget, delivering the systems infrastructure, and achieving technology goals established by the needs of the business. Using creative ways to decrease cost is vital in any business role, but perhaps the most overlooked way to positively affect performance is to engage in "cost validation." By this I mean employing a hybrid of decreasing cost and increasing revenue by closely accounting for the services and infrastructure being consumed by internal departments and external customers.

Before the advent of Big Data the consumer data storage industry thrived on a model of over subscription. Businesses could count on departments and customers using less of the product or service than they were being charged for. However, due to the data intensive nature of cloud infrastructure and rapidly growing rate of consumer data generation the oversubscription model is less and less profitable. Customers and departments are quickly creating enormous amounts of data and they are interested in only paying for what they use and more importantly using what they pay for.

You spent millions of dollars on your storage infrastructure, and a large portion of it is slipping away. Just like retail stores have departments dedicated to theft, loss-prevention, and inventory control, IT departments and service providers need to think in the same manner. We have quota systems, and auditing in place, but in our experience this is not enough to guarantee all the bytes are accounted and paid for. Instead of throwing hardware at a growing data problem, businesses need to first and foremost validate the usage and be able to account for it.


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