The future of data management is getting exciting – and very intelligent. The time has come when the IT world is re-examining big data analytics with artificial intelligence (AI), and that’s just the beginning.
According to Gartner’s 2019 CIO agenda survey, 14% of global CIOs have already deployed AI and 48% will deploy it this year. More organisations are adopting artificial intelligence, yet while adoption is increasing, some enterprises are still questioning the business impact and benefits, claims Gartner.
So what does AI for data management actually mean? What does it do and why does your business need it? To answer that question, we need to look back in time.
Over the past two decades, data storage costs have significantly changed and, as a result, the data content stored has shifted too – from carefully selected information needing a backup stored locally at a higher cost, to very affordable storage alternatives allowing all kinds of data being backed up and easily accessible at all times, guaranteed by cloud technologies.
Recently, however, things have gone through a change yet again. The cost of backup and disaster recovery is increasing. This is led by the simple fact that we constantly back up everything. In other words, it is not the cost of disks or a cloud that helped hike up the price of storage, it is the amount of data we keep.
With all that data being stored, how do we distinguish what we want to keep and where? Is it going to be kept on-premise, or in a cloud, or perhaps in one of the datacentres? How do we filter and prioritise the information essential to run our business smoothly and at the lowest cost possible?
Here is where things get really interesting – artificial intelligence for data management. The software opportunities in this area seem to be endless and invaluable when it comes to keeping your business organised and cost-effective. The idea is to keep the right data on the right drive (or in a cloud) at the right time.
Intelligent control of storage costs
With the right AI software, enterprises can easily control their data management budget by having visibility of how the data is distributed across the storage tiers. Ideally, your business wants to keep the hot data easily available in a faster storage and the cold data stored somewhere cheaper, such as a cloud.
Software can be programmed in so many different ways in helping you distinguish your most essential data from the secondary information. Search rules can be applied by using the metadata properties, such as the last time the data was accessed, amended, created, by whom, how big the data is, where it is stored, the type of compression, and so on.
“Intelligent data management enables you to control the information stored from being unnecessarily duplicated, saving valuable space and therefore gaining more control over your budget”
Jason Daly, Exertis Hammer
Setting the search criteria, saving them and allowing them to be run live, or periodically, saves your business time and keeps your data organised, but most importantly it allows you to prioritise data protection.
Possibilities of merging AI with data management are endless. They help enterprises not only with their budget planning and deliver cost savings, but they also allow larger non-profitable organisations manage their vast data for an effective storage usage.
AI and data management can play a crucial role in various vertical markets, such as medical research, autonomous car development, media and entertainment, and gaming, to name but a few.
IT managers working for research centres or hospitals, with the help of intelligent software, can create projects where the results of medical research are stored safely and protected. The software will be programmed to recognise that the data saved is important (as research cannot be repeated) and, for safety, it will be kept in a various locations such as a cloud, a local disk, a datacentre or a disaster recovery site. In case of an emergency, this will allow IT managers to retrieve the incidental loss of the valuable data in no time.
In the automotive industry, artificial intelligence has many applications. Not only does it drive autonomous vehicles, but helps in building them – robots drive optimisation and the rethinking of processes and production in innovative ways. AI software can be programmed to detect a driver’s behaviour, to control a vehicle’s predictive maintenance, or even assist with automotive insurance purposes.
To carry out all of the above and many more actions, data management is a crucial part of AI application. Data must not only be easily accessible and well organised, it has to be safely stored and protected at all times. Introduction of data management software allows important data storage monitoring, its flow and security.
Exertis Hammer vendors StrongBox Data Solution and InfiniteIO are market leaders in the field of artificial intelligence for data management.
StrongBox’s product, StrongLink, provides your business with autonomous data management where all the important information is stored safely and protected at all times. StrongBox has been chosen as a data management tool in the world’s largest enterprises across 17 industries.
InfiniteIO, powered by the world’s fastest metadata engine, delivers the lowest possible latency to enable applications to run faster, reduce development cycles and increase data productivity.
