Three Big Data categories for better information control

According to Garner’s 2012 IT Predictions [4], “through 2015, more than 85 percent of Fortune 500 organizations will fail to effectively exploit Big Data for competitive advantage.”  The report elaborates that big organizations are ill prepared to address both the technical and management challenges posed by Big Data. Collecting and analyzing the data is not enough. Data has to be processed so that it can be understood and presented in a timely fashion, to aid strategic decision-making.  

 

Big Data is certainly an important phenomenon that will dominate IT conversations in the year ahead. Along with data explosion, CIOs are also expected to continue to place priorities on virtualization and cloud computing, as means to control IT cost, improve efficiency and effectively mine business intelligence. All of these also imply that increasingly, the IT department will be an important pillar in business innovation.

 

Loh Ching Soo, NetApp’s country manager for Singapore outlines three key priorities for 2012 that will help companies control their data and accelerate business innovation: 

 

Many CIOs are already looking to virtualization to reduce costs and improve IT performance, while achieving elastic scalability in their operations. In the year ahead, a virtualized shared infrastructure will continue to be an important foundation for realizing further IT efficiencies, such as cloud computing and virtual desktop environment.

 

Virtualization will also unlock capabilities that are previously out of the organization’s reach. For instance, virtualization has made disaster recovery much simpler and cheaper. Organizations requiring a full mirror of their primary systems can simply duplicate these files onto a virtual machine, thus eliminating the need for redundant hardware.

 

Underlining these innovations is the need for a dynamic storage infrastructure that can support dynamic provisioning, back-ups and recovery. 2012 will see organizations paying closer attention to their virtualization projects, and extend their virtualization efforts beyond the servers. CIOs will now realize that storage virtualization is necessary to reap the full benefits of a shared infrastructure.

The uncertain economic climate is forcing organizations to re-look their infrastructure. Consolidation and convergence will continue to accelerate in the year ahead.  To stretch limited IT dollars, CIOs will pay closer attention to enhancing storage and overall IT efficiency and reclaim time and resources that are currently under utilized.

 

Storage scaling is no longer about adding or buying boxes. CIOs need to think about technologies that reduce the overhead of duplicate data and eliminate wasted capacity, thus reclaiming storage capacity that has been paid for.  Deduplication reduces data by an average of 45%. While deduplication is already a popular option for many CIOs, the year ahead will see more sophisticated storage efficiency technologies being utilized to further drive innovations. Thin provisioning, cloning and data compression will come into play in many storage environments, as the demands for IT flexibility increases in the year ahead.

The pressure on CIOs in the year ahead is to make sense of the structure and unstructured data flowing through their organizations. To do this, CIOs must first understand the solution areas they need to target to spark business innovations and drive the speed of decision making in their organizations.

 

 

Big Data needs can therefore be classified into three key areas:

-  Content analytics. The need of organizations to take full advantage of their digital universe, and turn data into high-quality insights that enable smarter decisions.

 

-  High performance. This defines a need for organizations to perform complex analyses at extremely high speeds, while dealing with petabytes of data growth.

 

-  Archiving content. This is the function that most organizations will seek  because they need a scalable solution to support petabytes of data, billions of files and objects, while eliminating physical storage boundaries.

 

The onset of the Big Data phenomenon will provide the impetus for organizations to examine their digital universe more closely, and lay the foundation for the right data management solution that can grow with their organizations.

 

“While vendors are coming out with a variety of different solutions, the Big Data sector has yet to see the ideal one-size-fits-for-all solution. In selecting a solution for Big Data, our recommendation for CIOs is to look for a future-proof solution that does not introduce further complexity with each stage of business growth,” says Soo.