“Internet of things” edge devices are playing an increasingly important role in big data analytics. Should internet of things data go back to a centralized cloud for analysis, or should computing power go to the edge? And will the data still be relevant once the process is complete?

“You don’t want to be acting on yesterday’s data, because things have happened, things have moved on,” said Emma McGrattan (pictured), senior vice president of engineering at Actian Corp. This means that data must be computed on the spot anytime and anywhere in a hybrid environment, she added.

McGrattan spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the recent BigData NYC event. (* Disclosure below.)

Insights are inextricably tied to the data’s age and relevance, so speed of computation is paramount, according to McGrattan. In today’s distributed environments, it’s important to act on data in real time and make it part of applications as they are deployed. “Probably the biggest challenge is bringing compute to the data and pulling all of that together,” she said.

Benchmarks show that Actian offers the fastest SQL access to data on Apache Hadoop big data framework and off, according to McGrattan. The company has always made high-speed analytics a key focus.

A cryptic answer to GDPR

Actian is expanding its portfolio with greater internet of things capabilities. For example, Actian now offers the nano-footprint, embedded Zen PSQL database for internet of thngs.

“I’ve got PowerPoint files that are bigger than this database,” McGrattan said. “You put it in a device, set it. It can run for 20 years. You never have to touch it.”

As for analyzing the data that edge devices capture, the upgraded Actian X hybrid database integrates data for real-time analysis. Its Vector in Hadoop — a columnar SQL database that runs natively in Hadoop — has data analytics, security and compliance capabilities. Actian allows for the encrypting of internet of things data both resident on devices and in transience.

“When it comes to GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], a lot of it is around process, so what we’re doing is guiding our customers and making sure that they have secure processes in place,” McGrattan concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of BigData NYC 2017. (* Disclosure: Actian Corp. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Actian nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE