As the economy begins to become increasingly digitized, big data is becoming a crucial asset for companies and organizations moving forward. It is the currency that will move and influence customers, and companies are wrestling through many questions and challenges as they move forward into a digital transformation in order to capitalize on big data growth.

“We actually are starting to call data a capital asset. It’s not very different from the other things that you have on your balance sheet — there just isn’t a scientific method or an agreed-upon method to really value it yet,” said Varun Chhabra (pictured), senior director of product marketing, storage and analytics, at Dell EMC. “But I am sure that 10 years from now or maybe earlier, just like we have stock exchanges, you could probably have data exchanges where you have data be traded. It’s monetized; it’s valued.”

Chhabra spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Keith Townsend (@CTOAdvisor), principal at The CTO Advisor, at the Dell Technologies World event in Las Vegas. They discussed the increasingly digitized economy and big data challenges. (* Disclosure below.)

Capitalizing on big data through organization and storage management

As companies wrestle with the newfound capital of data, major challenges arise, according to Chhabra. One big challenge is making sure that big data isn’t just sitting somewhere in a silo. “If you have data locked in silos, you can’t correlate them,” he said. “And if you can’t correlate them, you really can’t run analytics. The magic of insights comes out when you’re correlating disparate data.”

Another big challenge is exponential growth in big data and how to harvest that growth. “It’s not uncommon for our customers to tell us that they’re seeing 30, 40, 50 percent year-over-year growth in their data,” Chhabra stated. “How do you harness all that growth?”

Since 80 percent of data is still unstructured, Dell EMC has created services like Dell EMC Isilon and Dell EMC ECS to help create lakes of data and cost-effective scaling initiatives to help companies manage their growing data and organize it in ways that will help them grow this currency of data for the future, Chhabra concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Dell Technologies World 2018 event. (* Disclosure: Dell EMC sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell EMC nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE