Big Data Can Mean Big Costs
Making sound technology investments and getting strong returns are key pages in the IT playbook. When it comes to managing big data and the massive increase in data velocity, variety and volume, this could be troublesome. No matter how hard employees try, they may find the process of searching through mountains of new information is costing time and money. It's up to these same IT professionals to identify technology approaches that can cut through data sprawl to make finding corporate content more efficient than ever.
The mounting costs
The rising price of storing big data does not come directly from commodity storage. In fact, falling costs in this area make up one of the primary causes of data sprawl. Companies can afford to keep the massive amount of information their digital operations create, improving their analytics and archiving efforts. The budget hit for buying storage hardware has become so minimal that companies now keep many times what they retained only a few short years ago. The massive costs of handling information this way come from the wasted time spent by knowledge workers as they try to navigate the information maze.
Knowledge workers have the important responsibility of retrieving information from within companies' infrastructures. Every new piece of hardware that's added gives them more territory to cover, and deploying new applications creates more silos which can hide vital content. Sending employees down blind alleys with confusing and large file structures means wasting considerable time and money. A positive becomes a negative in this case, and IT departments must find the way back to efficient operations.
A new way of finding data
Introducing a new layer into the data management environment could give back the clarity that companies have been missing. Software for indexing all the content the business is holding could not only help these workers gain their search efficiency back, it could make the process simple enough that staff members across all departments can further boost efficiency and affirm the cost savings.
When businesses use solutions like ViaWorks from VirtualWorks, they gain insight into the actual content within their files. The days of searching by metadata tags alone can end, meaning that no matter how unwieldy their information reserves become, they will have a way to find what they need, whether it is for an independent project, an outside audit, legal action, a consumer request or anything in between. This means that firms can go back to appreciating the cost and operational benefits generated by new commodity storage options, without the fear that they are wasting their money as a result. Big data doesn't have to have big costs.