In the era of pervasive engagement, enterprises around the world continue evolving by integrating innovation – especially cloud applications and services – to become more connected and responsive.

Analyst predictions and industry researchers agree that CIOs are pursuing cloud, mobile, applications, social collaboration, managed services and the Internet of Things (IoT) to drive value, differentiation and optimisation.

We know that the number of devices and end-point connections added to enterprise networks continues to increase, but what about the data? The latest forecast from Cisco states that mobile data traffic worldwide grows 10-fold within five years from 30 exabytes in 2014 to 292 exabytes by 2019.

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The ‘connected enterprise’ has been around for several years now and it continues to experience a vast escalation in new data and connections (including IoT and M2M). In addition, the connected enterprise must accommodate new device types, multiple OS’s and various form factors (e.g. wearable technology) – this will prove to be its greatest challenge in 2015.

CIOs of connected enterprises are investing in technologies that can monitor, manage, secure and support multiple connections, while managing their associated risks, including cost. CIOs, of course, manage costs on an ongoing basis and monitor impact on productivity to assess the broader potential of new connections and associated assets across the enterprise and supporting ecosystems (especially supply chain).

But is this ‘management’ the boundary of all possibilities? How could enterprises use intelligent data analytics to calculate the value of their broader connectedness on their bottom lines? And do enterprises have the infrastructure capacity or expertise to make it work? If the data can be extracted and analysed, it can be quantified and measured instantly, giving it the potential to be informative, predictive and valuable.

Vital insights can be extracted from how an organisation operates. For instance, where does the enterprise generate data? How does it gather the information? Which connections are the most productive? Employing a systematic approach to gaining the answers to these questions enable companies to calculate the real value of new working practices and ensure they are as impactful as possible.

Organisations that leverage intelligent analytics in this way are creating a new category of organisation: the quantified enterprise.

Quantified enterprises use existing data to make better business decisions to meet their corporate goals – to achieve transparency into how, why and to what effect devices are being used on their networks.

The quantified enterprise understands that connections are not just ways to communicate; they are stockpiles of vital data. Accordingly, these types of enterprises analyse and quantify how technology influences the performance of each department; the real benefits seen from current data usage; and how businesses can use this view to facilitate ongoing improvements.

But are you equipped to do so?

The value of this data is in cross-referencing and delivering actionable insights – both of which rely on speed of access. Consequently, these most data-reliant operations must be executed in a timely manner in order to have maximum impact on business processes.

Therefore, organisations aiming to define themselves as ‘quantified’ will need to think carefully about their architecture options for storing the data in secure, scalable, cost-effective, assessable and agile structures.

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Given these criteria, cloud innovation becomes a critical and, in some cases, overwhelming part of the strategy. Enterprises must consider shifting not just data, but costs, to an opex model, and then carefully consider sunk cost investment within a legacy infrastructure.  

Embracing new technology and constantly evolving its connectedness can raise the stakes for any connected enterprise. Once businesses actualise insights from connection data, enterprise stakeholders will be able to affect outcomes reactively and proactively into every facet of their value chain.

As 2015 gets underway, global organisations will have to build this capability simply to stay competitive, respected and relevant in the connected ecosystems in which they compete.

Sourced from Troy Fulton, Tangoe