Last month in Services Angle, we focused on mobility. We explored topics from challenges to emerging trends and impacts that effect organizations that embrace mobile technology. This month, we will take a look at another topic that is quickly becoming an enterprise imperative – data infrastructure.

The amount of data we create is growing exponentially. According to IBM, everyday business and consumer life creates 2.5 quintillion bytes of data per day. In fact, 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. Data infrastructure refers to the many elements an organization must have to place capture, manage, access and secure their data. These efforts are becoming increasingly complex as the data businesses create and collect continues to rapidly grow in both size and diversity. Organizations are racing to find and acquire the right tools for accessing, interpreting, securing and storing the data – driving impressive increases in big data spending.

Despite its challenges, data has the potential to bring enormous benefits. McKinsey & Company, identified five ways data can yield organizational value:

1. It can unlock significant value by making information transparent and usable at much higher frequency.
2. As organizations create and store more transactional data in digital form, they can collect more accurate and detailed performance information on everything from product inventories to sick days, and therefore expose variability and boost performance. Leading companies are using data collection and analysis to conduct controlled experiments to make better management decisions; others are using data for basic low-frequency forecasting to high-frequency nowcasting to adjust their business levers just in time.
3. It allows ever-narrower segmentation of customers and therefore much more precisely tailored products or services.
4. Sophisticated analytics can substantially improve decision-making.
5. It can be used to improve the development of the next generation of products and services.

In short, data is an essential ingredient for modern businesses to thrive. It is an important business asset.

This month we will explore how and why data is growing in the enterprise, how data growth is impacting storage strategies, how businesses are accessing and analyzing data, how the data market is evolving and how vendors are responding.