High quality and newly harvested is always healthier than cheaply processed and stale. Of course, we’re talking about data here, not food, but the analogy stands. Relying on old, inaccurate data in today’s digital economy will damage a company’s performance and financial health.

“It’s about the immediacy of data so that they can act accordingly,” said Anthony Brooks-Williams (pictured, left), chief executive officer of HVR Software Inc. “These days it’s table stakes. It’s about winning, or just surviving, compared to years ago when day-old data, week-old data, that was OK.”

Brooks-Williams and Diwakar Goel (pictured, right), global chief data officer at General Electric Co., spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, for a digital CUBE Conversation on the importance of freshness, quality and security for business data. (* Disclosure below.)

Real-time, trustworthy data is a business imperative

Back in the heyday of big data (all of five years ago), the game was about gathering massive lakes of information. Today, a typical data use case involves real-time analytics and up-to-the-moment insights. Data has to be both fresh and accurate or those insights will miss the mark and strategy will go astray.

“If you truly want to unlock what can be done with big data, you have to go at the operational level. You have to run your business using the data real time,” Goal said. “The fidelity and the accuracy of data has to be spot on.”

As companies cope with ever-increasing amounts of incoming data, the requirement for accuracy rises in parallel, according to Goal. “When you’re bringing 3 billion, 5 billion rows of data every five to six hours, even if you’ve dropped 1%, you’ve lost a huge set of insights,” he said.

Looking for answers to why it was experiencing data loss and quality problems, GE partnered with HVR, integrating the company’s real-time data replication solution into its Predix digital industrial internet of things platform.

“Where we’ve worked with GE is … to support the scale, the complexity, the volume of data, many different sources systems, many different [business units],” Brooks-Williams said.

That data is typically business-critical financial information that is accessed via dashboard by GE’s executives. And “it can’t be wrong,” Williams-Brooks stated.

“Businesses these days want to make decisions on the freshest data that they can,” he said. “Specifically over the last year, because … not only is it about winning, it’s about survival and doing business in the most cost-effective way.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: HVR Software Inc. sponsored this CUBE Conversation. Neither HVR nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE