The first half of 2020 challenged businesses operationally, hindering many digital transformation initiatives and creating urgent business priorities that centered on productivity, efficiency, and the customer experience in the new environment that the COVID-19 pandemic brought about. To meet these goals, businesses are increasingly relying on data: they are collecting, pooling, analyzing, and storing more data from more sources as a means to derive business insight and gain a competitive advantage.

The new operating environment also accelerated adoption of hybrid and multi-cloud IT environments that can support users, applications, and data spread across diverse locations. This hybrid environment introduces challenges related to managing and protecting data consistently across infrastructures, and creates opportunities for data management providers to offer new features and capabilities to help customers manage data better.

This study analyzes results from the 2020 Frost & Sullivan Global Cloud User Survey about how businesses are using and managing their data in a pandemic-altered environment. It examines business requirements for data management services, and outlines growth opportunities for providers.

Author: Karyn Price