To Truly Leverage Your Data, You Must Optimise Your Data Storage

To Truly Leverage Your Data,
You Must Optimise
Your Data Storage

© 2020 Bernard Marr, Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
To Truly Leverage Your Data, You Must Optimise Your
Data Storage
Data is the fuel of industry and commerce in the information age. Insights and analytics
help us answer questions about how our businesses should operate and who our
customers are with ever-increasing accuracy. Companies can use artificial intelligence (AI)
to put products and services in front of the right people when they are making buying
decisions. Robots and automation are driving efficiency in every business process, from
manufacturing to logistics to HR. And the global network of connected devices we refer to
as the Internet of Things (IoT) – from smartphones to self-driving cars – means machines
can communicate and talk to each other to solve problems with no input from us.
Every single one of these game-changing developments is powered by one thing – the
vast and ever-increasing flow of digital data that we are generating and are able to
capture, store and analyze.

Data Storage
It’s clear that some companies have gone on to revolutionize their industries – and the way we live –
by harnessing this flow of data, creating new services for us that make our lives easier or better. This
includes tech giants with their search engines, communications tools, and e-commerce, as well as more
specialized solutions covering everything from ride sharing to streaming entertainment, booking
holidays, and dating.
Unfortunately, not every business has had the same success. It’s been frequently reported in any
number of industry studies and reports that a majority of the data that businesses generate is not
used, and many organizations are still struggling to manage, let alone monetize their data streams.
Here I’m going to take a look at one of the first hurdles companies have to overcome – storage. It's a
seemingly simple one, but lack of a strategy for overcoming it can lead to a lot of headaches further
down the line, as data volumes continue to grow and decisions need to be made about what data is
important at what particular time.

Data Storage
Cloud services offer near-unlimited capacity for organizations to store as much information as they
need, but there are complicating factors. Some data may be too sensitive or come with too high a
regulatory burden to host off-site. Some data may need to be accessed instantly from anywhere in the
world, while some may simply require archival for legal reasons. And data may need to be audited
regularly to make sure it is still relevant and hasn't become outdated or possibly even illegal due to
changing regulatory frameworks around the world. Not knowing where your data is, how many copies
you have, or how to access it at any given time can severely impede your abilities to carry out these
essential functions.
For the most valuable, insight-rich data, the fastest and most highly available storage systems are a
necessity. Modern business analytics operations require the ability to move and sort large volumes of
data to provide business users or customers with the responsive, push-button functionality they expect
from services today. And it has to be backed by encryption and security because trust is everything –
no one wants to use a service that will endanger or expose them due to handling their data in an
unsafe way.

Intelligent Data Storage
Today’s most advanced data storage systems, such as the IBM FlashSystem
family, store information on solid-state non-volatile media to achieve the best
possible speed, resilience, and security. They also take advantage of AI
technology, including machine learning tools, to smartly manage the way data is
stored and accessed, further increasing the speed of access and minimizing the
chance of errors or data loss that could impact your business. For example, data
that is predicted to be accessed more frequently will be queued and ready to go
when it is needed, whereas data that is likely to be less mission-critical may be
flagged for transfer to a less accessible but more secure environment, such as
tape storage, for archival, or even deleted if storing it may create further
problems. To make these predictions, IBM relies on insights from over two
exabytes (two billion gigabytes) of data it has under management.

Intelligent Data Storage
Resilience is another key requirement that any business wanting to get serious
about data needs to figure out. If your essential internal and customer-facing
operations are all built around acting on data-driven insights (which, of course,
should be the aim), they can't grind to a halt because there are problems with
data flow or infrastructure issues. This might mean ensuring data is constantly
backed up across cloud and on-site servers (while maintaining regulatory
compliance) as well as legacy systems. IBM provides this for its FlashSystem
customers through its FlashCopy technology that allows production data to be
rapidly copied and replicated. This means that in situations where data integrity
is absolutely vital, two or more identical copies can be kept continuously
synchronized, in separate physical locations, and restored with virtually nothing
lost, should an unexpected disaster happen.

Coping With Very Fast-Moving And Constantly Changing
Datasets
One organization that has tackled the problem of implementing the infrastructure needed
to deal with truly fast-moving data is the UK Met Office. Its data is used by governments
to plan for changing weather, by supermarkets to react to seasonal trends, and by
researchers investigating climate change. For this to happen, it needs to ingest and
analyze 300 million weather-related data points every day and make them available as
insights to its customers. In fact, it does it all twice – to eliminate the risk of data flow
being interrupted during development.
To do this, it has developed a hybrid cloud strategy built on IBM FlashSystem, and
although its original assessment was that flash storage might be prohibitively expensive, it
turned out to be a cost-efficient solution due to the high level of compression it enables.
This lets them build the type of high-performance data infrastructure needed to push its
data and insights from its in-house servers to the public cloud and on to its customers.

Datasets
Another example of a data strategy adapting to cope with ever-increasing
volumes and workloads needed for today’s applications comes from the Roman
Catholic Church – perhaps not the first place we would think to look!
The Archdiocese of Salzburg needed a solution to more effectively provide
services such as support and community outreach to its congregation, as well as
preserve and provide access to its massive record of historical documents and
literature, some of which is over 1,000 years old.

Datasets
By migrating to solid-state, non-volatile storage systems and leaving behind the
mechanical disk-based storage, with its lower access speeds and higher fail rate, the
archdiocese was able to increase its response times by 10 to 20 times while also improving
security and encryption. Due to the higher availability of data and better understanding of
their storage system, thanks to AI analytics, the church is now embarking on a project to
make its fascinating historical records accessible via the cloud.
As data becomes an increasingly important piece of an organization’s operating assets, it’s
important not to underestimate the importance of making the right decisions when it
comes to storage. It's no longer a simple choice between cloud or on-premises, with a
hybrid approach often seen as the best way of realizing those all-important efficiencies.
Every business needs to consider storage as a core component of their data strategy, just
as they would with data acquisition, analytics, and actioning.

Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a
strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps
organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and
understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data,
blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is a frequent
contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day
Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers and shares content that
reaches millions of readers.
Visit The
Website
© 2020 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
© 2017 Bernard Marr , Bernard Marr & Co. All rights reserved
Bernard Marr is an internationally best-selling author, popular keynote speaker, futurist, and a
strategic business & technology advisor to governments and companies. He helps
organisations improve their business performance, use data more intelligently, and
understand the implications of new technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data,
blockchains, and the Internet of Things.
LinkedIn has ranked Bernard as one of the world’s top 5 business influencers. He is a frequent
contributor to the World Economic Forum and writes a regular column for Forbes. Every day
Bernard actively engages his 1.5 million social media followers and shares content that
reaches millions of readers.
Visit The
Website

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To Truly Leverage Your Data, You Must Optimise Your Data Storage

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To Truly Leverage Your Data, You Must Optimise Your Data Storage