Since the early days of the public cloud, data has been a central concern for organizations looking to move applications and workloads into these environments.

The worries around data governance, security, privacy, and compliance have been well documented and continue to be top-of-mind for many businesses as they make the journey to the public cloud.

Contino’s data maturity in the public cloud report is a comprehensive study of the current state of data management and its future trends within the public cloud. 272 IT decision-makers from organizations worldwide were asked about the state of data maturity in the public cloud within their business. Here are some of those results:

2021 Report Findings

90% of businesses use data science to drive value from their data and insights. The report also found that about 50% of businesses use hybrid multi-cloud, making it the most popular storage plan, with 63% of organizations having at least one AI/ML project in the production of the cloud.

Cloud migration makes around one-third of technical use cases with IT and healthcare organizations most likely to report having a defined cloud data strategy.

However, despite these advancements, there is still much work to be done regarding data maturity in the public cloud because security poses a technical challenge for organizations bringing data to the cloud.

Data Maturity in the Public Cloud

Data maturity measures an organization's ability to effectively govern and manage data as it flows through the business.

In the past, data maturity has been largely determined by an organization's ability to govern and manage structured data. However, with the rise of big data and the cloud, unstructured data has become critical in determining data maturity.

Data maturity, in other words, is more than just how data affects an organization's day-to-day functions; it's also about how it may enable organizations of all shapes and sizes to accomplish things they couldn't have done previously without using data.

When you consider data maturity from this perspective, it becomes an issue of empowerment: how data can be utilized in a solid way to produce new insights and breakthroughs that may eventually become realities.

The key to unlocking the value of this data lies in an organization's ability to govern and manage it effectively.

To attain a high level of data maturity, data must be thoroughly ingrained in the organization and fully incorporated into all decision-making and activities. Data maturity is often measured in stages.

Stages of Data Maturity

Data Discovery

At this stage, an organization is just starting to become aware of its data's existence and potential value. They may not clearly understand where the data is or how it can be used.

Data Governance

This is when organizations start taking steps to better handle their data. They begin to develop policies and procedures for managing and governing the data. This includes things like defining who has access to what data and set rules for how it can be used.

Data Integration

This is when organizations start bringing all of their data together into one place to be more easily managed and analyzed. This can be a massive undertaking, as it often involves integrating data from multiple disparate systems.

Data Analysis

Once all the data is collected and integrated, organizations can analyze it for insights. This is when the actual value of data starts to become apparent.

Data Optimization

The final stage of data maturity is when organizations take all of the insights they've gleaned from analyzing their data and start to put them into practice. This can involve making changes to business processes or re-orienting the company's strategy around the insights gleaned from data.

Looking Forward to 2022

The state of data maturity in the public cloud is constantly evolving at a rapid pace. This means that by 2022, the majority of businesses will be in the advanced or even the mature stages of data maturity.

This is great news for businesses, as it means they will have access to the insights and intelligence they need to make better decisions and compete more effectively.

The cloud infrastructure market value in Australia is expected to top $3bn by 2025 as demonstrated by some research insights. Additionally, in 2021, the total cloud market spend was $1.74 billion which is a year-on-year increase of 28%, and the big six hyperscale global clouds continued to dominate the Australian cloud market with an accumulation of $1.16 billion in IaaS revenue.

Public cloud use and maturity have already reached the mainstream amongst Australian businesses and by 2021, 39% of Australian businesses were already in the development phase, where cloud services would be investigated and developed since cloud and hosted models began to replace on-premises applications.

Closing Thoughts

The future of data maturity in the public cloud looks to be a promising one. More companies are investing heavily in using this model for their business operations, which is leading to an increase in demand for even better security and privacy features than what we have today.

With so many benefits and such high potential returns on investment, it’s no wonder that public cloud computing has become such a popular option among organizations looking at new technologies.

In 2022 and beyond, we can expect even more impressive advancements in this area, making it easier than ever for businesses to derive value from their data.