ANZ firms spending more on data management

Soaring data volumes, increasing data complexity and the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) are driving organisations to improve their data management practices, according to Christine Low, head of observability for Asia-Pacific at Splunk.

This need is reflected in the company’s latest data management report, which found 88% of respondents in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) increased their overall spend on data management last year, slightly less than the 91% of global respondents.

The key drivers for this increased investment include data volume growth (cited by 75% of ANZ respondents) and evolving regulatory requirements (73%). As for regulations, 63% admitted that data management challenges had led to compliance failures.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules are “a huge data management cost”, Low said, adding that impending July 2025 changes to regulations affecting the Australian financial sector will make data management even more important to compliance.

Effective data management also offers significant security benefits. Among organisations globally that have fully implemented data federation, data pipeline management and data lifecycle management, 82% reported improved mean time to detect (MTTD) incidents and 34% said they have suffered fewer data breaches.

Low noted that traditionally, data management focused on consolidating data. “That was an expensive approach, but it did eliminate silos,” she said. “Today, the focus is on resilience.” Modern approaches like data federation, data tiering, data quality assurance and data reuse enable organisations to achieve faster access to larger data volumes while simultaneously lowering costs.

For example, 61% of ANZ organisations (compared with 67% globally) with partial or full data federation reported faster data access and average savings of $1.2m (A$1.86m). Furthermore, 50% of those using data tiering cited reduced storage costs as a top benefit.

Furthermore, data reuse understandably makes data sprawl less of a problem, with just 46% of organisations that are reusing data reporting that high data volumes are a problem, compared with 71% of the rest.

A significant advantage of data federation is that it allows data to be accessed wherever it resides (subject to access controls), eliminating the costly process of data migration.

A unified data platform incorporating federation also improves data usability and visibility, Low added. However, she suggested one of the most common challenges is “breaking down the organisational silos that work against these ideas”.

With organisations increasingly exploring or actively implementing artificial intelligence (AI), data management will play an even more important role.

“Data quality is important for AI,” Low observed. Indeed, 84% of respondents said their organisation’s data strategy improves the accuracy of their machine learning models, and 72% reported it helps remove bias from AI training datasets.

For organisations yet to embark on a modern data management journey – and the report indicates only a small proportion of local and international organisations have fully adopted such practices – Low advises starting by “determining where their organisation’s data is generated and how it is used, and what governance rules are appropriate”.

Not keeping up with data management practices could have financial implications. According to a global Veritas study conducted by Vanson Bourne, organisations reported losing as much as $2m a year because of their inability to manage data on a day-to-day basis.