New innovations and new technologies are accumulating more data than ever before. Enterprises are becoming more data centric, lending to different types of applications, tools, networks and infrastructures to manage the massive volume of data. And it’s not limited to corporations, but to individuals as well.

For example, you get in the car to head to your office, track your route, taking photos and marking locations of some good places you see along the way, all the while creating data. Using your mobile wallet, you pay at the coffee shop, then you stop at your parking lot and you swap your card to enter your office premises–again creating a piece data. You received calls on your cell phone and send text messages, continually creating data. Now for every activity that you do you creating data, multiply by the number of activities you do in a day.  Starting to get the picture?

According to IBM, there’s 2.5 quintillion bytes of data we create every day, and the number is increasing exponentially. There are industries, products and services cropping up all around this data. Enterprises now capture more detailed data, social and media platforms are exploding around search and advertising, all leading to industry drivers around Big Data.

Enterprises are speaking in terms of petabytes (a million gigabytes) now. But the question is; are we collecting all these data? A report from Computerworld suggests that most of the data is simply never collected. CERN, the fiber network company, manages up to 25 petabytes of data each year and stores 45.3 petabytes across 53,728 disks on its computer centers.  The amount of data it stores is equal to the processing power of 100,000 of the fastest PC processors, but in reality it can only deliver about 20 percent of that computing capacity.

From enterprise to startups, storage and big data matter

Companies are now putting more cash flow towards expand their storage capacity and services around this. Oracle today revealed the Exadata Storage Expansion Rack, a system to store a petabyte of extra data storage to its Exadata Database machine. The system offers customers a 96 Terabyte quarter rack system in the form of dedicated racks and each rack to support 2-TB hard drives. Oracle plans to capture the data warehousing appliances applications and online transaction processing applications mostly used for reads and writes purpose.

And startup venture Zettaset has raised $3 million from Draper Fisher Jurvetson and EPIC Ventures to invest in its big data solution, set to help employees analyze big data in order to make business decisions in real time. Its powerful data analytics software, Hadoop, offers user friendly graphical interface to manage more than a million petabytes of data.

EU on big data and social responsibility

The data-driven future offers some major opportunities for individuals and companies alike. But with rising industries comes the need for challenges and regulation. One challenge is how to capture the most important data and deliver it to the right audience in real time. Other challenges crop up around how to store the data, how to analyze and estimate its size and computational capacity. European Union (EU) members are looking for a way to regulate big data consequences around social responsibility and emerging technologies. The Centre for Social Responsibility in the Digital Age (SRDA) along with experts from various fields of research, industry and politics are formulating code of conduct and regulation on security, privacy, child safety, education and health safety. The primary goal of this body is to provide real solutions that the industry and Government face in this big data era.