Dubai: The ability to capture and process the ‘Big Data’ is now possible due to the growth of inexpensive storage and limitless computing, along with the invention of new technologies.
The incredible potential of Big Data continues to be driven by the growth of data from traditional applications, modern applications, sensors and intelligent devices along with masses of new public data such as social media feeds.
“The new technologies offer real-time analysis and a direct connection to action through new applications and products,” said Habib Mahakian, regional general manager for Gulf and Pakistan at EMC Corporation.
He said that ‘Business Data Lakes’ are fast becoming a top corporate priority as they are seen to fill a critical gap left by traditional data warehousing.
A Business Data Lake contains structured and unstructured data from a wide variety of sources and the analytics are focused on building models to predict the future. It is a shared resource and it may contain a lot of carefully administered data.
“Companies with successful data lakes are leveraging the data and predictive models to build new products, applications and business models to redefine their industry, taking or extending the ‘market leader’ role,” he said.
The amount of data created in 2014 in the Middle East and North Africa region stood at 249 exabytes, which is equal to 3.8 per cent of the global data created. It is predicted to reach 1,835 exabytes in 2020, around 4.3 per cent of the total data created globally. One exabyte is equal to 1 billion gigabytes.
He said that EMC is offering a suite of solutions and services on the Federation Business Data Lake in just less than seven days.
The fully-engineered solution includes leading storage and Big Data analytics technologies from EMC Information Infrastructure, Pivotal and VMware.
He said that data lakes allow enterprises to balance between standard data that needs to be used consistently and localised information and combinations of data required by different business units.
Data lakes lie at the very core of any “smart service initiative” offering a simplified solution that allows both public and private sector entities to integrate disparate sources of data while enabling personalised analytics, in “near real time,” he said.
