Think the information-explosion notion is a myth perpetuated by information
management vendors trying to sell you millions of dollars of storage gear?
At least one research firm disagrees. In an EMC-sponsored “digital universe”
study, IDC estimated
that 988 billion gigabytes of digital information will be created in 2010.
That figure is six times the amount of data we created in 2006. Where
does it all end? Will the info glut stop before we find our data pipes
gummed up, or at the very least, see our datacenters grow to frightening
proportions?
Part of EMC CTO Jeff Nick’s job, along with his
counterparts at IBM , HP
, Oracle
and other information
infrastructure providers, is to worry about this problem.
Nick recently chatted with internetnews.com about the study results
and expounded on EMC’s philosophies for handling the data dilemma.
Q: For information management purposes, EMC clearly has an interest
in gaudy statistics like this, but why should we care?
Some of them are for impact and effect. My eyes opened wide on a couple of
these things. Sound bites like these, grounded in fact, actually help the
industry, help tech suppliers, help consumers actually grasp the magnitude
of what we’re discussing. I find it particularly helpful as a CTO because we
tend to talk in strategic and technical terminology. But that’s not as captivating as a simple picture or
set of bullets. I think these numbers serve as a catalyst for meaningful
discussion.
Q: Is EMC still positioning information lifecycle management (ILM) as an answer to this data explosion?
As information explodes and grows in its complexity and variety… rich
digital media images, audio, multimedia, unstructured content, documents…
there’s a real challenge to the management of that info and how you derive
value from it and protect and secure it.
Do the tools that are in place
actually scale? I would argue that they do not scale. The reason is that
we’re forgetting the human element. The human element associated with
information management, operations and protection and security and access,
is the most expensive aspect of IT datacenters.
From that dimension alone, the sheer volume of information is driving and
accelerating opportunities that require us to take ILM to a new level. That
is what I call policy-based, automated ILM. We need to take the people out
of the equation. We need people to specify policies and we need the software
and hardware to behave in accordance with those objectives and automatically
do backup, data migration, data replication and protection to the access of
the information.
As the volumes of unstructured information explode, the
tools put in place need to be coordinated so they don’t overwhelm the
businesses that are creating them.
Q: That policy-based approach sounds a lot like the manner in which IT people want to apply
security these days, too. Is there a connection?
In the past, we’ve tended to think about securing infrastructure by putting
up firewalls and locking things down in vaults. As that relates to
information, that would make you kind of schizophrenic because you want
people to use information and share information, so simply securing the
infrastructure and the network and the resources doesn’t give you nearly the
right level of security granularity and policy controls to ensure the
protection of information and the secure access and sharing of information.
We need to take the IT industry to a next level as it relates to information
security. We need to have policy roles in place. We need to have more than
just, “Oh this is a file versus a blog versus an image.” We have to go beyond
that to the content.
Q: Where security enters the conversation, compliance follows. What does the
IDC report say about compliance?
As information grows in its complexity and its flavor, you have to ensure
real-time access to information for business use. As we move from a
Web-based mobile global world, with information created outside the firewall
by consumers, small business and enterprises are sharing information.
That
was called out in this report very clearly. There was a quote in the report
that 70 percent of the digital information is being created by consumers and
small businesses, and yet 85 percent of that information is flowing back to
the large enterprises that need to protect it for legal and compliance
reasons.
Businesses need to protect it, whereas if consumers lose their photos and
they didn’t back them up, oh well. But once transactions are committed into
a bank, you won’t take an excuse for why you’re getting a billion-dollar
bill because it was a mistake and they’re sorry.
The fiduciary
responsibilities on the enterprises that actually touch the information
being created outside their domain are still a huge burden that the business
world needs to step up to. It’s amazing — the volume of information coming
from rich digital media and MySpace and Facebook. Ultimately there is a
watershed that needs to be protected and managed by the enterprises that are
touching it.
Q: What opportunities does EMC see for information management?
We’re talking more and more about tools that allow us to gain access
to the information in a semantic way, so that we can use it to turn from
data to information and information to knowledge. This is becoming
increasingly important, and is a challenge given the rich variety of
information and the way one type of information relates to another.
If you
look at the medical profession, there’s a focus on text and images, on the
day to day what’s happening with a patient. You need to be able to share
that information with others that have interest in that information — radiologists, and other specialists. Who do you share it with after the patient is discharged? How do they gain access to records and make them securely accessible to another doctor? How do you find that information and how do you mine it? How do you use it?
This is an example of where I think the major opportunities and challenges for information processing really await us. This is the next step: to translate
from data, to information that we can type, to knowledge that lets us
discover, locate, access and reason about information.
That’s where the
information explosion that’s talked about in this digital universe study is
most compelling. You really do have to attack all of these different
dimensions of security, information protection, management and knowledge
management to connect the dots and help customers process their information
assets.
