Organizations are creating more data than ever and striving to use as much of that data as possible—as intelligently as possible—to accelerate digital transformation, empower the new workplace, drive differentiation and deliver new customer experiences.
The growth of data continues to astound. The amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the past 30 years combined, per IDC. By 2025 it is estimated that 463 exabytes of data will be created daily; the equivalent of 212,765,857 DVDs a day, per the World Economic Forum.
For IT teams, the question is not just about how much data is being created and stored; it’s about what the organization can do with that data to drive innovation with intelligence.
Unlocking the value of your data is not a simple task, particularly in today’s environment where unstructured data is growing exponentially and organizations need to leverage data to and from multiple clouds, edge locations and on-premises data centers.
IT teams must close the gap between how their organizations are using data now and the vast potential for business success if—and when—they can leverage more data, faster, more comprehensively and with greater levels of analytics and intelligence.
For example, a recent primary research study commissioned by HPE1 shows that data mining is one of the top investment areas for IT, yet on average only one third of company data is actually used for artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning analytics.
Until organizations can successfully leverage more of their data, they are leaving literally millions of dollars’ worth of incremental business value on the table—not to mention opportunities to strengthen their relationships with customers, heighten brand recognition and achieve other tangible and intangible business benefits.
Unlocking the Value of Data
To truly leverage the massive volume and variety of data that organizations are creating, IT teams need to focus on building a comprehensive data strategy. This is particularly important as organizations seek to increase their use of AI and machine learning, which rely on comprehensive data to deliver ongoing business value.
A key element of a comprehensive data strategy often includes a data fabric, which can make the full assortment of company data available to all who have rights to it, in the form they need it, no matter where the data resides, whether in the cloud, at the edge or in the data center. A data fabric provides a single platform for collecting, curating and analyzing the full range of data needed to power a digitally transformed enterprise.
While a data fabric serves as the foundation, it is but one element of a comprehensive data strategy. For organizations seeking to unlock the value of their data, there are additional technologies, tools and strategies that can push you forward on your journey. Here are examples of Digital Game Changers that illustrate the profound power in unlocking the value of data.
Purdue University is using the power of massive amounts of data to learn more about our world. Researchers at Purdue’s Center for Global Soundscapes can map the planet’s major biodomes with technology that sees what the eye misses and preserves the sounds of the planet for future generations. The underlying technology, from HPE and partners, enables the study of petabytes of audio data to deliver insights into ecosystems that visual media often miss. The system makes use of a data pipeline that consolidates field data from the most remote locations on the planet back to the university in a secure environment.
Lunit is a South Korea Healthcare company that uses AI and deep learning to deliver faster and more accurate cancer diagnoses. Lunit INSIGHT products for mammography and chest imagery are more than 97% accurate in the detection of certain cancers. Lunit’s AI and deep learning applications are powered by a variety of HPE solutions to process millions of medical images with accuracy, speed and prompt insights that are dramatically improving patient outcomes and saving lives.
NYU Abu Dhabi was established in 2010 as the first comprehensive liberal arts and science institution in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major university. NYU Abu Dhabi uses AI and machine learning to achieve greater speed and precision in academic research, built on a world-class high-performance computing cluster using HPE Apollo Systems accelerated with NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. The speed and capacity of the technology is vital to achieving the university’s goals—with the ability to process 385 teraflops with a storage capacity of over 2.8 PB, thus increasing performance of some computational processes by nearly 100X.
In addition to these Digital Game Changers, another example of the power of unlocking data is The Edinburgh International Data Facility (EIDF), Europe’s first regional data innovation center, located at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The centre will enable research and development on initiatives such as food production, climate change, space exploration and genetically tailored healthcare.
Through a £100m framework, the EIDF procured a fully customized stack of end-end infrastructure including HPE Apollo Systems, HPE Superdome Flex servers and HPE Ezmeral Runtime Enterprise software capabilities. The solution also included a tiered storage solution, private cloud infrastructure for converged analytics and high performance computing, as well as the ability to support and deploy entire pipelines of data from the edge through to the data center.
The EIDF will offer researchers access to high-performance computing and artificial intelligence technologies to apply analytics to modeling and simulation to increase accuracy of results and speed time to discovery.
Taking the Next Step
Not every organization will need the power, capacity and speed of the organizations cited in this article. But virtually every organization will need to have a plan and strategy to use their data efficiently, comprehensively and intelligently to empower business innovation and digital transformation. To learn more about how your organization can unlock the value of your data, please visit Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
1 HPE commissioned study. HPE GreenLake Challenger Research Report, September 2020, Emerald Research Group
