What are the biggest challenges organisations face when trying to leverage data at scale across hybrid and multicloud environments?
Grant Caley: The biggest challenges facing organisations are around interoperability, quality, security and accessibility. Interoperability is critical as many businesses struggle with integrating and moving data between different platforms, data formats and architectures, all of which can lead to silos.
On top of this, data at scale is powerful but can overwhelm organisations when they need to select or find specific information. As you can imagine, finding what you need when you need it can become difficult very quickly. This especially the case for organisations with inconsistent access controls and management.
Businesses must ensure that they curate access in a considered way to work across multiple platforms. This challenge of who is owning and managing data is only amplified for global organisations or those working in sensitive sectors. Managing security and mitigating cyber risks can’ t be
an afterthought either, particularly as multi-cloud approaches can increase an organisation’ s attack surface.
Security can’ t be viewed as a secondary priority or an add-on, it must be built into the data architecture at every step.
Ann Maya: Governance and legacy systems integration remain the two major hurdles stalling organisations’ ability to leverage data at scale. Governance is about control: knowing who is accessing the data, when and for what purpose. Without clear authorisation and oversight mechanisms, you can’ t have a trusted data foundation.
166 December 2025