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Winning business with Cloud and Big Data

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE, INDIA: IT is an Industry in Transition. Today’s CIOs are being asked to deal with a perfect storm of technology disruptors such as Big Data, Open Source Paradigm, Cloud, Mobile and Social Media.

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The combined impact of these new technological forces is not only re-shaping IT but also transforming customers’ business models. Partnering closely with the business to drive strategy and outcomes is the mantra for CIOs and IT leaders today. Further, organizations expect us to deliver at unprecedented levels of efficiency and agility. So, if you are part of the IT function today, or planning to be there in the future, then you have a lot of excitement in the offing.

Here are a few insights for example.

To begin with, the rate of digital information growth is exceeding Moore’s Law. As per IDC, in 2010, the world’s digital universe count cracked the zettabyte barrier to reach an estimated 1.3 zettabytes (a zettabyte equals a trillion gigabytes, or a billion terabytes). In 2011 alone, the world generated and consumed 1.8 zettabytes of information, growing by a factor of nine in just five years. 

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And yet, it is estimated that the digital universe will reach a conservative figure of 35 zettabytes by the end of this decade.

IDC says organizations will need to manage 50x more information by 2020. The number of servers will grow by 10x. However the pool of IT staff available to manage them will grow only slightly (1.5x).

Information security is woefully inadequate. Only about half of the digital information that should be protected is protected, as per IDC.

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IT has evolved significantly in recent years. We do a lot more than show up when a computer or network crashes. Not only do we efficiently store and protect information, however, we also harness it for business benefits. We are all in the business of advancing our organizations and fostering customer productivity.

We help users and organizations harness the power of innovations and technology advances. When technology and business models are relatively stable, the focus is on efficiency and cost-cuts.

As new technology waves arrive, through IT innovations for instance, the innovations are applied to the core business leading to changes in the business model. Forces such as Cloud Computing and Big Data are big waves in our industry…bringing with them the promise of enormous opportunities in this climate.

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The Cloud Is Transforming IT

It is important to look at cloud computing as the transformation that can address ITs problems of agility, manpower challenge and cost management. Cloud computing is simply the ability to acquire elastic computing capacity on demand in a “pay per usage” model.

It brings considerable business benefits within reach such as dramatic savings in IT budgets, increased business agility and responsiveness to changing priorities, fast deployment abilities, service-based IT business model, optimized usage of infrastructure, and optimized technology that offers low risk.

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This is a fundamental shift as we transform IT to get ready to deliver “IT-as-a-Service”, and running IT as a business. Enterprise IT's real job becomes creation of attractive and competitive services that internal customers want to consume; and as in a business, the more demand, the better for IT. So from a function that essentially managed the show at the backend, with cloud computing IT is now transforming into a function, into a business, that is charging the business back for the IT services it consumes, while addressing all direct and surrounding challenges of the digital information deluge.

The ubiquity of cloud services gives today’s users unprecedented choice to go external (public cloud) for IT services forcing internal IT to compete for their business in the same way external service providers do. As a result, the IT organization will know it has succeeded by winning market share within the enterprise!

Big Data Is Transforming Business

While cloud computing is proving to be a revolutionary solution for many issues IT has struggled with, Big Data has entered the picture as “the ability of IT to enable business success”. The key attributes of Big Data are the size of data (volume), structured and unstructured data of various kinds (variety), and fast-changing data in real time (velocity).

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Add to this the critical element ‘value’ -unlocking new sources of business value and wealth from the vast amounts of digital information that organizations are sitting on. This leads us to the four Vs that characterize the Big Data Paradigm: volume, variety, velocity and value.

Given the exponential data growth estimates, almost everything will be a Big Data problem in the future, including the challenge of determining what data is useful, what data is redundant and what data is useless. Big Data requires us to use the new analytical methods and technical architectures and invest in new skills (Data Scientists, for example).

Big Data applications span multiple industries and scenarios. They can be leveraged to improve the quality of everything from marketing and sales forecasts, to product quality guidance to company security alerts.

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In effect, Big Data promises to offer a step change in the way digital information is harnessed, and in the way businesses function. CEOs will look to new capabilities offered by Big Data to achieve true competitive advantage: power existing businesses and create entirely new business models.

This further magnifies the business-centricity of the CIOs’ and IT Leaders’ roles in the organization.

Conclusion

The CIO’s challenges are increasing exponentially. Cloud computing addresses most of these problems and is rapidly being adopted. This is forcing IT organizations to transform to compete with public cloud offerings that their internal clients may be attracted to. Cloud computing and the explosion of data/ content also create a mandate for advances in analytical capabilities to unlock business value from the sea of data -- Big Data.

CIOs are in the driver’s seats to harness the potential of Cloud and Big Data to advance their organizations. And hence, IT can really stand for “Inspirational Transformation” for its organization!

The author is senior director, Global IT, at EMC Corporation.

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