Data Center Journal

Volume 32 | June 2014

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n aturally, a technology with the potential power that big data offers will garner all manner of opinions: Proponents will assert that companies that fail to adopt it will soon find themselves out of business. Opponents will either dismiss it as a passing fad or simply point out that the espoused benefits are far more difficult to obtain than the hype suggests, perhaps indicating niche uses rather than industry-wide adoption. Fad or otherwise, big data has been the intersection of a num- ber of trends and concerns in the IT industry, ranging from the cloud and cloud data centers to security, privacy and the grand potential for use and abuse. In some sense, most news regard- ing big data is already old news, but a number of topics may be coming to a head. e question is how individuals, companies and governments will act or fail to act in response. Big Value or Big hype? e questions of privacy, security and so on all become moot if big data cannot deliver value to its users, in which case they would quickly discard the technology and all its associated troubles. But hype oen surrounds a nugget of value—the difficulty is de- termining whether that nugget is big or small, gold or silver (or fool's gold). According to Chris Surdack, global subject-matter expert on infor- mation governance for HP Autonomy, big data is a transformative technol- ogy, but although the tools to employ it are available, companies have yet to learn how to derive value from them. "e technical capabilities underpin- ning big data required time to mature, and indeed they have. ree years ago the idea of having a trillion or quadril- lion rows of data readily accessible for analysis seemed like a far-off dream. Today, such processing capabilities are pedestrian. So, the bigness of big data has only recently become really big, and the analytic techniques required to find insight in these quantities of data have also had to stretch to catch up." But Surdack suggests that "most companies have not yet figured out how to use these new capabilities. Most organizations are practicing 'big BI,' not 'big data.' Big BI, or big business intelligence, is the same old data warehousing and analysis that companies have been performing for twenty or thirty years, only now it's against much more data. Despite billions of dollars being spent on big data technologies, most organizations are asking the same old questions, and hence are only getting slightly more accurate answers." As companies gain experience with the technology, however, he believes it will become a necessity. "In five years we feel that there will be two types of organiza- tions: data enabled and data disabled. Big data will no longer be a manage- ment or technology fad, it will be a core business strategy." Big data analytics has been one of the hottest news topics of the past few years—both for the presumed benefits it can bring as well as the social and political problems it raises. According to Gartner's "Hype Cycle" for emerging technologies, big data analytics (colloquially termed big data) just about reached the peak of inflated expectations in 2013. The research firm predicts another 5 to 10 years before this technology will arrive at the plateau of productivity, at which point it may become more of an unquestioned (and unquestionably useful) tool. THE DATA CENTER JOURNAL | 23 www.datacenterjournal.com

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