BANGALORE, INDIA: Every year I try to publish a set of storage trends that I believe most IT shops are trying to address and where technologies exist to help resolve.  Here are my thoughts for 2012...

1) Storage breakthroughs nipping the “Digital Dark Age” in the bud

Since the early 1990’s, an increasing proportion of data created and used has been in the form of digital data. Today, the world produces more than 1.8 zettabytes of digital information a year.

Yet, digital storage can in many ways be more perishable than paper. Disks corrode, bits “rot” and hardware becomes obsolete. This presents a real concern of a “Digital Dark Age” where digital storage techniques and formats created today may not be viable in the future as the technology originally used becomes antiquated.

We’ve seen this happen — take the floppy disk for example. A storage tool that was so ubiquitous people still click on this enduring icon to “save” their digital work and any word, presentation or spreadsheet documents — yet most Millennials have never seen it in person.   But new research shows storage mediums can be vastly denser than they are today.

While new form factors such as solid state disks will help us provide more stable longer-term preservation of data, and the promise of "the cloud" allows access to data anywhere, anytime. 

Recently, IBM researchers combined the benefits of magnetic hard drives and solid-state memory to overcome challenges of growing memory demand and shrinking devices. Called Racetrack memory, this breakthrough could lead to a new type of data-centric computing that allows massive amounts of stored information to be accessed in less than a billionth of a second.  This storage research challenges previous theoretical limits to data storage—ensuring our digital universe will always be preserved.

2) Data curation will provide structure in midst of the data deluge

Now that we have the capability to preserve our digital universe, we need to find a way to make it useful. We need to take the next step past data preservation to data curation.  Data curation is the active and ongoing management of data through its lifecycle. This smarter data categorization adds value to data that will help glean new opportunities, improve the sharing of information and preserve data for later re-use. 

Social media is a great example of the power of curated data. Sites like FaceBook, Google+, Pinterest, etc. compile our digital lives and gives their users a platform to organize their content. However, there's also a lot of work involved in selecting, appraising and organizing data to make them accessible and interpretable. The key is bringing data sets together, organizing them and linking them to related documents and tools.

If data can be stored in a way that provides context, organizations can find new and useful ways to use that data.