Transforming Data Management by the Numbers

Here are two things that enterprises can count on as they cope with the explosive growth of unstructured and structured data in the digital economy:

1. It will be a struggle to manage the unrelenting growth of data flooding your mainframe systems.
2. You’re going to need help.

These two “certainties” are highlighted in a recent commissioned technology adoption profile conducted by Forrester Consulting on Transforming Data Management for Digital Business on behalf of BMC. More than 100 IT and database professionals in North American enterprises with mainframe databases showed us what they were facing.

There’s Just Too Much Data to Organize

As objects become too large, performance declines and costs rise.

• 100% of the enterprises have at least one object that’s too large to reorganize on a regular basis.
• 71% had 10 or more objects that were too large to reorganize regularly.

When availability and performance declines, customers can leave your website and take their business elsewhere. Think about it. How long would you be willing to wait to complete a transaction? How many times would you try before giving up?

Minimize Downtime Costs – Or Else!
About half of the respondents estimated downtime at $7,000 per minute. Traditional, outdated tools require downtime for changes. This downtime can not only result in lost customers, but huge costs to the business/bottom line.

• In spite of the problems associated with downtime, 70% plan to schedule downtime for database maintenance.

That’s why it’s so important to consider the advantages of using next generation technology with advanced automation that’s capable of learning, adapting, and reacting in real-time and doing all of this without downtime for maintenance.

Unstructured Data Is a Big Problem – One That’s Not Well Understood
Unstructured data is growing quickly and is very complex to manage, which means that it requires constant data integrity validation. However, in spite of this requirement:

• Only 41% of respondents fully validate and maintain unstructured data regularly
• 45% reorganize but don’t regularly validate unstructured data
• The remaining 14% are either still creating a plan to manage unstructured data or don’t reorganize or validate the data regularly

The bottom line: without validation, you’re putting data integrity and availability at risk.

How Advanced Automation Can Help
Survey respondents said the top six benefits they have realized or anticipate realizing by implementing an automated database management tool include the following benefits in order of priority:

1. Reducing application costs
2. Improving performance
3. Optimizing system resources
4. Minimizing complexity
5. Optimizing staff
6. Decreasing downtime

About half of those surveyed are also interested in automating database maintenance with zero downtime, automating the maintenance of unstructured data, and automating tuning and performance.

Next Steps for Transforming Data Management
You can’t use tools that were developed decades ago to meet today’s needs for data management in the digital economy.

• Half of the enterprises surveyed expect data stored on the mainframe to grow by 50% or more in the next two years.
• New applications are being developed rapidly to support the growth of digital business and workloads are generally increasing.
• In addition, experienced DBAs are retiring and a new generation of database professionals needs to manage more data more effectively, intuitively and faster than ever before.

BMC Next Generation Technology for DB2 is helping organizations to transform data management and address the data management challenges organizations face today and into the future.

To learn more about what BMC and Forrester have to say about these findings see the webinar: learn Transforming Data Management for Digital Business.