What is the one thing that if it was taken away, it would irrevocably cripple your business? Your data. Your data is all the information you store about your company and how it operates. It tells you who your customers are, how much money you have in receivables, the state of your supply chain and more. The bottom line? Data is your most important asset.
What is the most important asset in your company? Your people? It is painful when good people leave, but no one is irreplaceable. Is it your inventory (assuming you are a company with physical goods)? What if a portion of your inventory disappeared? It would be bad, but you can make more goods. Is it your real estate? Buildings could be destroyed in a natural disaster. This would be difficult, but you can find new locations.
What is the one thing that, if it was taken away, would irrevocably cripple your business? Your data. Your data is all the information you store about your company and how it operates. For example: who your customers are, how much money you have in receivables, what orders you have taken, the state of your supply chain, who your vendors are, your sales pipeline, your support tickets and more. Imagine you woke up one day and all of that information just disappeared. What if all the data you use to run your company was wiped out? You can't get "more of it." You can't easily replace it. Sure, you could stitch together some of it from what is in people's heads — but that would be patchwork at best. For most businesses bigger than a mom and pop operation, loss of data would be the end of the line. This is why ransomware is so dangerous, and why companies pay out huge sums to these criminals. There were thousands of ransomware attacks in 2021, a trend that is up 60% over the previous year. It’s no secret companies need their data to function.
Not only do they need it to function, but the ones who use their data more effectively have an edge over their competition. The more you know about how your company operates and how your customers consume your product, the easier it is to avoid problems (supply chain issues, customer churn, etc.) as well as identify new opportunities (cross-sell, upsell, new market segments, etc.).
So how much time and money do you spend on your data infrastructure? Do you treat it like it is the most important element of your business? Do you treat it like something that will help you grow? Or do you treat it like a cost center? The quality of your data infrastructure determines how available, durable and safe your data is. Without a significant investment in your data infrastructure, you cannot get the insights you need from your data in a timely manner. This limits how effective you — and your team — can be.
We live in a data-intensive world. Every business needs to learn how to use their data effectively and to safeguard it appropriately, or they will suffer the consequences.
The road to the Data-Intensive Era starts at SingleStore. If you’re ready to evaluate your data infrastructure and tap into a modern database that delivers speed, scale and immediate insights, get started with SingleStore today.
