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Your business generates more and more information every day. So you need more and better storage.
According to SINTEF—the largest research organisation in Scandinavia—90% of the world’s data was generated over the previous two years. Another 2.16 exabytes of new data are added to the pile every day, a New Jersey Institute of Technology report shows.
Companies increasingly rely on these massive data troves to make decisions and interact with customers, and when the data is good, results can be amazing.
But What If The Data Isn’t So Good?
What if it gets corrupted or lost? Bad data costs US businesses hundreds of billions of dollars annually, and can flush huge chunks of a company’s operating profit down the drain.
And the more data stored, the bigger the headache.
For many industries, especially those holding data for years, the best solution is object storage. It ensures that a file stored decades ago will emerge intact—manipulation is impossible. If it becomes degraded over time, a healthy copy is substituted. Some versions of object storage can even fix the bad copy.
Today, providers offer a variety of object-storage solutions to suit enterprise needs. Here are six examples of business sectors taking a closer look at object storage as their need to retain information increases.
If yours isn’t among them, it may be soon. Legal requirements for data retention are spreading, and enterprises are finding new uses for previously harvested data every day.
Not all providers offer all of the features described here—this is a sampling of the ways object storage can be used in a variety of industries.
Media
Say a TV network has footage of a football game from 15 years ago. A news flash arrives—the quarterback is marrying a celebrity, and the network wants to show the old footage now.
Someone does a furious search and finally the file appears, but it’s been corrupted—the motion is jittery and the touchdown pass has disappeared. The anchor hems and haws until the next commercial break.
But if the footage had been stored as an object rather than a traditional file, three lines of defense could have prevented this problem:
- No one could have written over the file—that’s impossible when using “immutable” objects (objects that can’t be changed.)
- A “digital fingerprint” of the data would have been created when it was put into storage and checked every time it was retrieved. If a faulty copy was pulled, instead of simply sending an error message, the system would have substituted a good one while repairing the bad.
- The network could have set its software to perform periodic “health checks” to ensure stored information remained intact.
Which brings up an interesting question—if altering data is impossible, why are fingerprints and health checks necessary?
Though it’s unusual, even object data may deteriorate over time because of forces beyond control—anything from software bugs to cosmic rays. The difference is, if something is wrong, you know it right away, and the problem is instantly fixed. Quick fixes—even on the fly, while still retrieving data—are especially important in time-sensitive tasks such as media streaming.
Finance And Healthcare
Heavily regulated industries like finance and healthcare are obvious candidates for object storage.
Both must store documents for years and may be required to produce them on little notice. This has been true for years.
Nevertheless, during last decade’s real-estate bust, banks, mortgage servicers, and investors sometimes reported they couldn’t find important documents. Object storage would have solved that problem. It would also have prevented at least some of the fraud and forgeries that occurred.
In healthcare, doctors and clinics are sometimes required to save information throughout the life of a patient. Long-term medical studies hold data for years, much of it as space-hogging images—such as X-rays, MRI scans, or DNA sequencing that would quickly overwhelm most traditional storage systems.
Oil And Gas
Energy companies constantly reevaluate exploration sites. They use heavy, expensive equipment to measure seismic vibrations and collect 3-D images of underground deposits.
Though they may not choose to develop sites when the price of oil is as low as it is now, they don’t want to lose their hard-earned information. As with healthcare, years may pass before the data is retrieved, and the space-consuming images are well-suited to object storage.
Embedded metadata makes them easy to find when the time comes.
Retail
We all know retailers gather data on their customers, whether they use video cameras or cookies. Then they analyze the information to improve the customer experience and increase the chance of a sale.
But many retailers now store data without doing analytics. It’s information they don’t have a clue how to use today, but over time, it may prove valuable, especially when new applications develop. Instead of setting themselves up for regret, they are erring on the side of “too much” information.
Data you don’t plan to use for a long time—if ever—is a perfect fit for object storage.
Design
What do car manufacturers and dress designers have in common?
They both create hundreds of sketches for models that are never produced. But design runs in cycles—fashions change, but are later revived as nostalgia sets in. An idea that seems stellar today may have been overlooked in its time.
Showrooms and closets fill up fast, but an object is like a light switch—small and unobtrusive when you don’t need it, there in a flash when you do.
The Bottom Line
Big data means big storage—and that can mean big headaches for enterprises when data goes bad.
The best object-storage products prevent information from being manipulated, create digital fingerprints to ensure its integrity, produce multiple copies, and repair problems instantly.
It’s the ideal solution for industries that archive large amounts of information or big files—or those that would like to, but don’t currently have the right technology.
What's your take? Weigh in with a comment below, and connect with Ingo Fuchs (Google+) | @IngoFuchs (Twitter).
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• How Durable Is Your Data? For Safety, Consider Object Storage ~ @IngoFuchs
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This article was originally published on CIO.com.
Image credit: Steve Buissinne (public domain)
