The digital era of business has been upon us for years now. At the heart of this transformation is data. As businesses create and use more data, data volumes grow at an unprecedented rate and businesses face new threats of ransomware and cybercrime. As a result, IT leaders are seeking new ways to meet the demands of their business stakeholders who rely on data to accelerate their transformation initiatives.

The complexity of data management too has increased, but should businesses prioritize addressing those complexities? Does the ability to eliminate application disruptions, protect data against any threats, mobilize data across clouds and unlock value from your data have meaningful impacts on outcomes as you shift toward becoming more data-first in your approach? Will the benefits be material to the business, or is data management complexity simply an inescapable cost of doing business in this digital age?

In 2021, HPE partnered with ESG to conduct third-party research among 750 of your IT peers to explore the following: How are organizations tackling data management complexities, and what benefits do the best performing organizations achieve. The results were eye-opening. The leaders in addressing the complexities of data management, referred to as data-first leaders, are transforming their businesses to much greater a degree than expected, accelerating operations and new product delivery, beating their competition to market, and generating more revenue.

This eBook will discuss how, and to what degree, data-first leader organizations are improving IT and business results and outperforming their peers in terms of both technology and business outcomes. This eBook will also present the burden that data management complexities create for contemporary organizations and then highlight the characteristics that are more prominent in data-first leader organizations. We will also explore why a cloud operational experience IS the single most important step to eliminate complexity. Lastly, we share a data-first maturity model that shows where different businesses fall as they address the challenges of data management complexity.