Author: Steve Leeper, VP of Product Marketing, Datadobi
Bio: Steve Leeper oversees the market development for Datadobi and manages the Presales Sales Engineers team globally. A 30-year veteran of IT, Steve has held a variety of technical and sales roles at Andersen Consulting, Sun Microsystems, and EMC.

At the same time, however, it introduces some significant challenges, particularly around managing the growing volumes of complex data across disparate environments. With unstructured data now making up as much as 90% of the enterprise total, many organizations are building storage strategies across a patchwork of different technologies and services.

This can be highly problematic, and many organizations will be familiar with the associated inefficiencies, compliance risks and unnecessary storage costs of storing data across hybrid environments. Data visibility – or the lack of it – also means businesses lack insight into what data they have, where it resides, how much it costs the organization to store, or its value.

In these organizations, data silos are commonplace, often due to reliance on vendor-specific tools that can’t manage hybrid environments. Storage sprawl is often the default response, with IT teams adding more devices instead of addressing the real issues around effective data management.

A typical scenario might involve a large enterprise with a hybrid cloud setup spanning on-premises storage for legacy applications, a private cloud for sensitive workloads and public cloud services for scalability. Over time, data accumulates across all three environments – some critical, some outdated, but much of it unclassified.

Without clear visibility, the IT team struggles to determine what data needs to be retained, archived or deleted. Compliance audits become stressful, data migrations are slow and error-prone and costs rise due to duplicated or underused storage. Valuable insights are locked away in inaccessible silos, and new projects, such as deploying AI tools, are delayed because the right data isn’t readily available when needed.

Put simply, this situation is incompatible with how modern digital businesses are supposed to operate, where data drives everything from product innovation to customer service.

Data mobility in the hybrid cloud

So, what needs to change? To deliver on these priorities, organizations need a combination of visibility and data mobility. This happens when data must be  moved across different storage systems, locations and environments in a seamless and efficient manner. Armed with this capability, they can manage data based on business needs, access patterns or compliance requirements without being tied to a specific vendor or platform.

Data mobility also enables precise control over data movement through predefined rules or policies, supporting intuitive and secure management. When this technology is vendor-agnostic, organizations can seamlessly integrate it across diverse storage systems, clouds and applications, providing flexibility and compatibility within complex, multi-environment setups.

Getting there isn’t just a question of technology, important though that is. Success also depends on a change of mindset, away from storage-focused thinking in favour of data-centric strategies that prioritise managing what data is, where it lives and how it moves.

In this situation, the scenario is very different because the IT team has full visibility into their unstructured data estate across all environments. For example, with policy-based and automated mobility capabilities , cold or inactive data can easily be relocated to low-cost archival storage while high-value, frequently accessed assets are kept readily available for mission-critical workloads, such as analytics and AI. Another example is the relocation of data selected for inclusion in GenAI processing workflows which require the compute scaling offered in the public cloud.

Data is no longer tethered to specific systems or vendors, making migrations, consolidations and cloud infrastructure transitions fast and low-risk. Compliance audits benefit from clear ownership and governance policies. Perhaps most importantly, the business can act on its data, launching new services, training GenAI models or addressing a myriad of other priorities because the right data is accessible.

When this level of data mobility is properly integrated with hybrid cloud infrastructure, organizations can target a win-win where investment in hybrid cloud infrastructure can be precisely aligned with data mobility. For these organizations, focusing on data-driven business outcomes can take centre stage.