American Fire Systems (AFS) was facing several challenges with its IT infrastructure. The company's aging equipment was in need of performance improvements and replacement. As the company expanded into markets across Texas, the amount of data being funneled through its Houston headquarters began to bottleneck, impacting the user experience across the company and leaving it vulnerable to downtime if a disaster were to occur at its lone data center. AFS was also facing increasing cybersecurity threats and needed to comply with the Department of Financial Services Regulations.

East Thames, a large provider of affordable housing in east London and Essex, was facing challenges with their existing Disaster Recovery (DR) solution. The solution was untested, had high operational costs, and would require significant capital investments to make it fit for purpose. The IT team was required by the Business Continuity steering group to prove the ability to recover IT systems in the event of a disaster. Their current DR solution simply didn’t enable them to prove that a timely, safe and secure recovery was possible. As they embarked on exploring cloud technologies, the East Thames IT team prioritized updating their Disaster Recovery (DR) plans.

Pyramid Healthcare, a behavioral health company, was facing several challenges. They needed reliable reports to be readily available and a scalable infrastructure for their new Business Intelligence Platform. Their existing on-premises facilities lacked space, and they needed to ensure that medical records were secure and available at all times. Compliance rules required them to protect HIPAA patient information. With limited on-premises facilities, the Pyramid team realized they needed a scalable solution for their electronic medical records system that would grow by leaps and bounds.

Graubard Miller, a mid-sized legal firm based in New York City, was in need of a more cost-effective and reliable disaster recovery (DR) solution. The firm had a DR solution in place, a physical co-location site, but it was neither reliable nor cost-effective. The maintenance of the co-location DR solution was overwhelming with many manual steps required to do a refresh. Moreover, there was no cost-effective way to do DR testing, making reliability a constant question mark. The firm's director of technology, Steven Heller, began to investigate using cloud for disaster recovery. He investigated multiple cloud-based DR solutions before deciding to go with iland.

The City of Bend was facing challenges with its previous offsite backup strategy. The solution they were using, offered by one of the large hyperscaler cloud providers, had consistently failed to meet the city’s needs. It struggled to provide successful backups and imposed unmanageable ingress and egress fees. The city was also under constant threat of ransomware. The city needed a more responsive backup vendor that could reduce backup costs and enable secure and reliable access to data.

Trinity Fire & Security Systems, a rapidly growing company, was facing challenges with its traditional infrastructure due to the increasing number of customer contracts. Each new customer added to the company's data management and protection burden, creating a snowball effect. This growth necessitated an increase in data centre resources, which in turn required additional funding, time, and effort. The company's IT director, Lee Angell, recognized the need to explore new infrastructure options, specifically cloud for application hosting and data protection, that would better align with Trinity's objectives.

Benchmade Knife Company, a leading knife producer in the United States, faced a critical need for a business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR) plan. The company's data, encompassing emails, files, software, and operating systems, was a crucial part of their operations. A major loss of data, whether caused by ransomware, human error, or some other event, would be disastrous. The need for a BC/DR plan became a priority after the insurance adjuster shared audit results. The company needed to execute its BC/DR plan ahead of schedule to keep their business running and making money.

STRATA, a media software company owned by Comcast, was initially operating without an effective disaster recovery (DR) plan. The company's software, which facilitates communication between the buying and selling sides of its client base, was initially hosted on servers in a remote office. However, a power outage caused by a thunderstorm took out the sites, prompting the company to consider moving its servers to a more secure location. This led to the idea of having a large-scale data center, which in turn necessitated a DR plan. The need for a comprehensive DR plan was further emphasized by the impact of Superstorm Sandy, which, although it did not directly affect STRATA, highlighted the potential consequences of not having such a plan in place.

Greater Anglia, a major train operating company in Great Britain, was facing several challenges. The company was looking to eliminate burdensome tape backups, reduce backup costs, enable secure and reliable access to data, and protect against an increase in cyber threats. The company had made two massive investments over the last five years. First, they decided to replace their entire fleet of trains. Second, they replaced their wide area network. The new state-of-the-art trains required state-of-the-art technology that was ill-suited for the aged, low-bandwidth network Greater Anglia had in place. The bandwidth became such an issue that in order to preserve service quality the company limited cross file sharing. With the new wide area network connecting stations across the region, the company was then able to utilize Microsoft 365, including OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint.

The organization, a family-owned healthcare supply systems company, had an in-house disaster recovery plan for data and applications. However, when the organization acquired a local company, the IT department was tasked with taking over the new subsidiary’s IT. The senior systems engineer knew he needed to expand the existing disaster recovery plan to cover the new subsidiary’s data and systems but ran into a problem almost immediately. The equipment of the new subsidiary was old and the capital needed to purchase the additional equipment for migrating their data to the organization's environment was not approved.

Bachem, a global pharmaceutical and biotechnology company, was facing several challenges. The company lacked an offsite backup for its rapidly expanding data output, which included over 150 specialised applications ranging from standard applications for human resources and accounting to industry-specific applications that collect, process and retain important lab data and production recipes. The company also needed a solution with failover capabilities to keep its many critical applications running no matter the disaster. Furthermore, Bachem wanted a backup solution that could also protect the company’s Microsoft 365 workloads beyond what Microsoft already offered. The ever-looming and ever-increasing risk of cybercrime, including ransomware, was also a major concern for the company.

Help at Home’s IT Manager needed to implement a robust and customized business continuity plan that minimizes downtime of mission critical applications used by hundreds of employees. It also needed to meet their Recovery Time Objective, and be easily managed by his lean staff and fit into a limited budget. The IT organization at Help at Home is asked to provide increased services to the business while at the same time reducing IT expenditures. They began to investigate virtualization as a method of making IT more responsive to business needs. This includes more efficiently providing business services and ensuring high availability, as well as lowering IT costs, streamlining IT management, and becoming more energy efficient.

P&R Dental Strategies, a dental informatics company and SaaS provider, was at a critical crossroads during the go-to-market strategy discussions for its new application, “DentSource.” The company had to decide whether to continue investing in its self-managed, existing infrastructure or move to a managed cloud environment. The company was on the verge of tremendous growth and scalability was becoming both a concern and a goal. The financial commitment and human effort required to maintain hardware was a burden on the company that would rather focus on growth and the quality of services it’s providing to its customers. Additionally, as many of its customers are large public entities operating within the healthcare industry, security, and compliance play significant roles in P&R Dental’s business. The company must ensure it is compliant with HIPAA and undergoes regular security audits.

Nemours Children’s Health System had a big challenge around electronic information: It needed to change its culture, to move to a model where staff started pursuing data versus just receiving data. The organization wanted to shift from repeatedly building dashboards and reports to really enabling the organization. They wanted to bring all their relevant data from any system, across finance, patient care and the overall business, into one place for analysis.

ForbiddenPlanet.com, a leading science fiction retailer in Europe, was struggling with data analysis. The company had a vast amount of data but lacked a system for effective analysis. This was particularly problematic in their fast-paced comics business, where new editions are released weekly and accurate estimations of product demand are crucial. The company's management account meetings were inefficient, with an 80-page management pack of quarterly account data that was already out of date by the time of the meeting. The lack of real-time data analysis led to meetings ending with more questions than answers.

IndianOil, the largest public sector oil and gas company in India, first turned to data analytics with QlikView in 2012. Dashboards were created, mainly for the company’s chairman and directors. During a review of its IT infrastructure, IndianOil identified an opportunity to make more use of the increasing amount of data being held throughout the organization. The company saw the potential of leveraging this data to drive business value across the organization.

Pizza Pizza, a Canadian food chain, was struggling with managing and making sense of the vast amount of data generated from its operations. The company operates over 750 locations and fulfills over 20 million orders annually, generating a database with billions of fields. The company used to rely on static reports and spreadsheets to analyze its operations, which lacked flexibility and interactivity. The reports were generated daily and if a different perspective was needed, it would take days or weeks for IT to generate a new report. The company was unable to access real-time data and lacked the ability to drill down into the details of its operations.

Sketch Books, Inc., a bookstore and stationery merchandise company with 30 branches across the Philippines, was forced to shift its focus to e-commerce due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The company needed to ensure a high level of customer service despite the shift to remote working. The challenge was to maintain the same level of service and customer satisfaction while transitioning to a new business model.

The Hillsborough County Tax Collector Office (HCTC) is responsible for collecting and distributing local and state taxes and fees to various partner organizations. They serve as an agent for their partner agencies and all of their community members to ensure that the money that flows into their office goes where it needs to go. However, they were facing challenges in managing the vast amount of data they collected and in using it to improve their efficiency and the quality of their work. They initially used Excel to handle performance metrics and insights, but it was time-consuming and prone to errors. They then tried another solution, but it did not allow them to actively manage their data or understand why certain trends were occurring.

Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity was facing a decrease in the performance of warm cash appeals and needed to understand the reasons why and to explore more insight driven approaches to combat this. Previously, fundraising campaign reporting was done after each campaign by pulling data into Excel to create tables and charts, then moving these into Powerpoint for delivery and presentation. This often occurred after the next campaign was already live. The process was costly in terms of the time and resource required to prepare reports and did not allow the team to be as flexible and reactive as they would like.

Gazprom Neft, one of the top three oil-producing companies in Russia, was facing challenges in making data-based decisions due to the lack of a robust Business Intelligence (BI) unit. The company was already a year into their journey with Qlik, a data analytics platform, when the BI Department Head joined in 2013. The task was to further develop the internal Qlik-based processes. However, the allocation of resources was a major challenge, especially server resources. The company was also not always on schedule in the purchasing of new equipment. Change management was another challenge, particularly overcoming internal resistance without clear signaling from company leadership.

Nationwide Building Society, the world’s largest mutual financial institution, was facing a challenge with data management and analytics. The company's strategic vision is driven by its 15 million members, not the market or shareholders, and data underpins every one of their strategic goals. However, the company found that employees often worked within their silos or divisions and designed things for themselves, unaware that others in the organisation were trying to do something similar—often with the same data. This led to a lack of efficiency and a duplication of efforts. Furthermore, the company was using QlikView, but had licenses for only 500 people, limiting the access to data and insights for many employees.

Anurag Group of Institutions (AGI) is a large educational institution in India with a vision to maintain high academic standards and promote analytical thinking and independent judgement. The Department of Computer Science Engineering at AGI identified a serious skills gap for good data analysts in industry and business. With a forecast of 97,000 jobs that need to be filled in the area of data science, there is a huge need for skilled people. The department has been teaching 'Big Data' subjects to students and recognizes that the future for the next 30 years will be data analytics. However, they were seeking the best way to instruct students in data visualization and provide them with practical experience.

PSCU, a credit union-owned cooperative, was in the midst of a multiyear initiative to evolve and broaden its call center services when it realized the need for better data organization and visibility. The company was dealing with disparate data sources and flat reporting that lacked analysis, color-coding, and cross-functionality. The reports served specific needs but did not show all the inputs or outputs due to lack of integration. PSCU recognized the need to better organize its data to more effectively align with its business model and to provide the full suite of products and member experience required by its credit union relationships. The view needed to be cross-functional for the company to optimize and innovate where necessary.

Hendry, an asset protection firm, was facing a challenge of limited value in their services due to a narrow vision of their work. The industry was lagging behind in the adoption of technology and clients were demanding more than what was being delivered. The company realized that they needed to change and adapt to the fast-paced, technologically driven world. They wanted to provide more value to their clients than just services required within statutory law. They saw the potential of data and technology to transform their services and become a full-service advisory business.

Odyssey, a logistics and supply chain management company, was in need of a business intelligence solution that could help them keep up with competitors and add value for their customers. The solution had to be a non-cloud, on-premise solution to allow the company to maintain complete control over the operation. It also needed to be flexible enough to extend into a true 'visibility' platform on the front-end. The company spent almost all of 2016 trying different solutions during the discovery phase of the project, but none of them were the right fit.

Quooker, the creators of a tap that produces boiling water almost instantly, has been experiencing rapid growth, with a 100 percent increase every three years. To sustain this growth and expand operations across a complex global market, the company needed more precise forecasting and analytics tools.

BorgWarner, a global automotive components and parts supplier, was previously using a manual, spreadsheet-based approach to produce reports on total spend, supplier performance, and supply chain risk. This process was time-consuming, taking days to prepare for each supplier. The company faced a significant challenge in 2011 when Japanese suppliers were affected by a tsunami. BorgWarner struggled to determine the impact on their supply chain, products, and customer orders.

The article discusses the challenges faced by organizations in their journey towards data maturity. The first challenge is related to data quality. Organizations often have data quality issues, which become more apparent as they try to utilize the data. Issues can range from misspellings, inconsistent data entry methods, to software compatibility issues. Before any progress towards data-based decisions can be made, the data itself must be trustworthy. This requires creating mechanisms to ensure data quality. The second challenge is related to data literacy. Having great data is just part of the equation. Organizations must also have a genuine curiosity and the ability to ask the right questions. Most organizations are very familiar with asking, “what happened?” but the real power in analyzing data comes from more advanced questions. The final stage of intuitive growth involves reaching a level where insights about data trends lead to an ability to influence outcomes.

Transport fleets are crucial for modern commerce, and their efficiency is paramount. However, as fleets grow in size, their management becomes increasingly complex. To keep track, organizations have equipped their fleet vehicles with sensors. However, the sheer volume of telemetry data they receive is difficult to consolidate and convert into meaningful reports that point to effective business decisions. Montrans, Russia’s leading transport monitoring company, faced this challenge. It started as a fuel consumption tracker but its systems have since grown in sophistication and it wanted to move away from static reports to provide interactive fleet control and data-driven management.