by Angela Guess
A recent article takes a look at the growing need for smarter data storage solutions in light of the so-called data deluge. The article states that Big Data “promises to provide us the opportunity to turn information overload into an asset for better decision making by applying analytics. That insight can help identify business trends and consumer preferences… The challenge is storing, retrieving and prioritizing unprecedented volumes of data. Doing it the old way – throwing more resources at it — just won’t work. That’s inefficient and cost prohibitive. In 2009, the world spent nearly $4 trillion on hardware, software, services, networks and IT staff to manage data in the digital universe, according to IDC.”
It continues, “Take a look at storage. IDC states nearly 75% of the data that exists today is a copy. Organizations are spending far too much of their precious IT budget just to keep unneeded copies. Beyond budget, people resources are also being wasted. It is estimated that employees spend up to two hours a day looking for the right information, such as searching for a forwarded file in email archives.”
“Instead,” the article adds, “businesses need to capitalize on the potential hidden in the petabytes or even zettabytes of raw data. (For those wondering how big a zettabyte is, it is equal to 1 trillion gigabytes or 1,000 exabytes or about 250 billion DVDs.) Through intelligent storage and data retrieval systems, we can learn more with the information we have today to improve service to customers or open new revenue streams by leveraging data in new ways.”
