Latest Big Data Opinions

Jose Murillo, Chief Analytics Officer at Grupo Financiero Banorte, on AI facts, myths and the importance of an experimental culture.

Data lakes, in the absence of ongoing maintenance, will inevitably become swamps, unusable and unhelpful to your organisation

Privacy Shield’s invalidation shows data practices are under greater scrutiny than ever before. If they’re not already, sensible businesses should err on the side of caution

In the last few months, almost every business will have evaluated and, where necessary, updated its technology strategy and processes. Getting as close to business-as-usual has been a huge priority and focusing on operational infrastructure, communications, and collaboration tools and services has delivered widespread benefits.

But what about disaster recovery (DR)? How many organisations have reviewed and updated their approach to DR in line with their current situation? These are important questions that deserve specific attention, as plans that were in place for the ‘old normal’ might not be appropriate for rapidly changing circumstances. So, what are the current drivers of DR strategy and how can businesses ensure they can identify and adapt to any gaps in their approach?

Andrew Duncan outlines five ways that companies are embedding data-driven decision making to enable business resilience.

There is a great deal of hype around AI within a marketing framework. Whilst the technology could be incredibly useful and adoption could drive efficiencies and competitive advantage on a global stage, there is currently a great delta between what it can do, and what it currently is being used for.

“The possibilities of what the cloud can offer businesses and consumers is now only limited by imagination,” says Dan Middleton, Vice President UK & Ireland at Cloud Data Management company Veeam.

IT spending can be difficult to justify at times when finances are tight, and even harder to justify when there’s no sign of an upturn in the foreseeable future. Organisations that find themselves fighting for survival are more likely to instinctively want to redirect money to the frontline rather than the back office.

Anonymised location insights can help governments compare how population mobility, both by foot and by vehicle, has changed since lockdown measures were introduced.

Using susceptible-exposed-infected-recovered (SEIR) modelling methods, experts run simulations to calculate how the virus spreads. This uses mobility data to display virus movement geographically, allowing researchers to compare these patterns against the rate of transmission across stratified samples, such as age groups.

The importance of this data places companies like Vodafone Business as a key partner, especially with our pan-European presence and advanced big data capabilities.

Statistics and data are everywhere. We are awash with numbers that hype and promote discussion and grab attention. There is really no need for mind-boggling concepts or numbers.

We know there’s a lot of data being generated, that it’s growing, growing fast, and needs to be stored somewhere. We also know that ‘somewhere’ doesn’t necessarily mean the data centre but the Cloud where data can be stored on-demand, at minimal cost and in seemingly endless quantities, or at the edge where data is now being collected.

The world has a modern-day obsession with data. With nearly 90 percent of its data created in the last two years and enterprise data doubling every two years, we’re living in an era of data overload.

The challenge is wider than just dealing with the amount of data we own – it’s also about what we do with it once we’ve got it, given that between 60-90 percent of data is cold and infrequently accessed within a few months of its creation. Nearly everyone can create endless streams of data without difficulty, but comparatively few have become as effective at data management.

Last week, Europe’s highest court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), invalidated the EU-US Privacy Shield, a legal framework relied upon by thousands of US and EU companies to transfer personal data from the EU to the US.

The decision is perhaps no surprise, given the CJEU’s long-standing concerns about the ease with which the US government could access personal data of European citizens. Privacy Shield itself was an attempt to readdress the balance of privacy in favour of EU residents — but it has now been deemed inadequate.