Data is now the most valuable asset and more and more tools are being developed to analyze it, but in order to make sense of it, it is necessary to anticipate how to store it and how to manage it, counting on the correct infrastructure.
Annually, cloud software firm DOMO publishes a report on the amount of data collected every minute, and presumably the numbers are increasing year on year. The 2019 report, ‘Data Never Sleeps 7.0’ , states that this year there will be 40 times more bytes of data than there are stars in the observable universe .
In the 2018 chart , it was stated that “more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day” and that each person on Earth is estimated to generate 1.7MB of data per second . We are 7.75 billion.
88% of executives worldwide consider investing in big data and artificial intelligence as a priority need , according to a study by NewVantage Partners , a technology firm specializing in data-driven business transformation. In Spain, this tech market is being one of the fastest and most solidly growing.
Just taking into account the hectic activity of the approximately 4,500 million Internet users in the world, it seems logical to think that it is necessary to have the appropriate solutions and infrastructure to be able to store and manage all the information that these people generate.
We’re not just talking about social media or entertainment: 188 million emails are sent every minute , around 4.5 million searches are made on Google and more than 200,000 Skype calls are made . And these data refer to the panorama prior to the health crisis, since they are from 2019.
The fun ‘Data Never Sleeps’ graphics -version 2018 on the left and 2019 on the right-.The graphics ‘Data Never Sleeps’ -version 2018 on the left and 2019 on the right-.DOME
But what do we do with all that data? Where are they kept? How are they analyzed? For 81% of companies it is urgent to adopt a data driven approach that allows them to manage all this volume.
“We offer a file storage system that what is particular about it is that it is the tool that supports advanced analytical systems, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things , augmented reality and virtual reality … definitively everything that has to do with digital experiences that carries the weight of multimedia content ”, reports Vicente Llamas, Dell EMC Storage Sales Specialist , a leading company in this type of storage according to analysts and, in particular, according to the international consultancy Gartner .
The expert acknowledges that many projects of these very strategic and modern initiatives “remain in embryo or die of success” for reasons related to the lack of anticipation in terms of thinking about the infrastructures that will be needed when they want to be put into operation .
For example, in public clouds there are tools that people use very easily to start small development. “There will be companies that are capable of making very interesting applications, and that find a way to obtain useful data and be successful, but when it comes to putting it into operation, decisions have to be made that may be unexpected for many companies”, as if it is It is possible to upload your customer data to these spaces , both at the legal level and at the monthly expense level.
Another drawback that a project may face is having the application or tool developed and access to the database validated, but having difficulties when putting the machinery to work because the data is not in a single database, but in different files . Llamas explains it: “Many times, analytical tools can be used to search for customer information on different platforms.
For example, an insurance agency that wants to have all the data of a user that has to do with sport, for which they do a search for related words in their social networks , in their audios with the call center , in their digitized contracts, in your files, in your transactions … ”.
Therefore, not having the information you want to analyze in the correct place , either because the analysis tool is developed in the cloud and the database cannot be uploaded there or because the data is not correctly stored and is dispersed in various files instead of in a single repository, makes such innovative analytical or artificial intelligence projects unable to succeed .
“Not because they did not make sense or because they did not find a way to do it or the ideal algorithm, but because they did not have the infrastructures ready to put it into production,” emphasizes the expert.
MODULAR, SCALABLE AND READY FOR ANALYTICAL STORAGE
“We have the perfect infrastructure so that these exciting and modern projects of these emerging initiatives can be put into production with a company-level platform . It works in banking, industry, administration, medicine , multimedia … ”, says Llamas.
In all companies there are different file servers : printing, document management, marketing , commercial … in many cases there are servers for each department.
“Although this has been the case historically in companies, and in the past it was supposed to add an extra layer in terms of cybersecurity , now it is not like that and it has the disadvantage that you have separate, segmented information , and you don’t have any tool capable of start doing analytics on your 40, 50 isolated file servers “, says the expert.
In those cases, what you have to look for is a common repository of information , but it has to meet certain conditions: it cannot be a bag where you put absolutely everything without control or data management tools, it cannot be visible to all members of the company or that the whole team has access to move or delete the files and of course it must be protected from the outside. This is PowerScale, Dell’s proposal .
PowerScale is an innovative data storage system ideal for businesses.PowerScale is an innovative data storage system ideal for businesses.Dell
The analytics on this solution has several advantages, one of which is that it is an infrastructure capable of providing information in real time , compared to Business Intelligence on the classic database that will always indicate the past, that is, even if you have the most up-to-date system possible, your database will tell you at most how your company has been until a minute ago.
“80% of what companies and public organizations store are files – office documents, images, videos, etc. – that come from the marketing department, video surveillance systems, access controls … this tool You can take advantage of that information to help the business, ”Llamas clarifies.
AN EXAMPLE THAT SAVES LIVES: HOSPITAL SETTINGS
There are a multitude of companies that are dedicated to doing medical image analytics, providing the option for diagnoses to be carried out in a much faster, almost automated way, and even to create alerts for the early detection of diseases . A software capable of analyzing millions of X-rays a day and which has been taught with machine learning to detect an anomaly can use that applied artificial intelligence to warn of a health problem.
For example: many children have an X-ray of the left wrist to see their level of development, all those X-rays of a specific area of the human body show or should show something that doctors expect. If you teach a software this, when something out of place appears, a difference, it will not know what it is but it will know that there is something that is not correct and it will be able to alert the system, that if it is stored in a repository infrastructure in real time will put that X-ray immediately in the hands of a specialist who will be able to corroborate if there is an unexpected finding.
However, it is sensitive information and therefore you cannot upload it to any public repository. Although there are currently many companies that are dedicated to anonymizing medical records in order to take the images and use them for medical research, by doing this “you lose the ability to notify the affected person if that unexpected finding arises,” explains Llamas. “We can provide the correct repository for this: a private and common repository of information among all health centers and hospitals , so that this information can be used not only for research but also for early diagnosis,” he concludes.
APPLIED TO INDUSTRY
This system can also be applied to other sectors such as industry. For example, you can control the production of a certain product and know if it is being manufactured correctly by comparing final images . Differences can be found -if there are any- and a machine failure can be detected in time.
It can also be used to know if employees enter the factory with the appropriate protective equipment , not only those applicable to this health crisis, but for example if they are wearing the indicated protective glasses. It works the same way, you just have to compare the images: it would teach the system that faces with glasses are the norm and that it could detect faces that did not wear them.
“With PowerScale , in addition, the system does not alert you tomorrow that someone came in without the proper equipment yesterday, but alerts immediately, so that you can really avoid the problem”, concludes the expert in technology and data storage.
Why is it necessary to bet on this type of infrastructure? Because it is estimated that by the year 2025 the global volume of data will reach an exorbitant amount of 175 Zb, or what is the same: 175,000,000,000,000 Gigabytes of data. Those billions of images, files and documents that we are talking about have to be stored in the right place, to be able to be analyzed if we want them to be of any use .
