– Lisa Rhodes, VP of Corporate Strategy and Market Development at Verne Global, says:
The data revolution is alive and growing.
With information being collected from everyday transactions, conversations and actions on the Internet, there is a massive amount of data being captured and stored on a daily basis. A 2011 report from IDC stated that there were 1.8 zettabytes of data in the world and was doubling every two years. The report expected that by the year 2020, there will be 50 times the amount of data generated than exists today.
Companies are looking towards this massive amount of data to determine what business benefits can come from it. Can the data help discover hidden trends, unknown connections and other valuable information? A report from MGI & McKinsey’s Business Technology Office shows that analyzing these large sets of data will become a key basis of competition and innovation for businesses. Industries will increasingly need to rely on high performance analytics to conduct the business modeling that is needed to take advantage of all the information that is becoming available to them.
One particular industry is already taking advantage of this and reaping strong benefits from high performance data analytics. Data is critical for insurance companies as it is the foundation of the risk analysis that drives their business. Their job is to know the most recent patterns and trends regarding risks and catastrophes and it doesn’t do them any favors if the risk models rely on data that is several months old or lacking information.
RMS, the world leader in catastrophic risk modeling for the insurance industry, recently announced RMS(one), a real-time risk management environment purpose-built for insurance companies to manage all of their risk models, exposures and analytics on a single, open platform. High performance analytics that once took months to complete is now possible in just minutes. As a result, insurance and reinsurance companies are able to make better decisions on their business models with more accurate and timely information.
With all this high performance computing comes the need for high performance power and many data centers today with their aging power grids are unsuitable for these types of labor intensive applications. Companies need to look at towards renewably powered alternatives as a means to ensuring reliable and available connectivity for their critical business applications. With an abundance of power due to renewable energy sources, including geothermal, hydroelectric and solar, data centers are able to not only ensure that the data center has enough power for the applications, but also that the power costs remain low with price protection.
According to AtKearney, 90 percent of Fortune 500 companies will have at least one big data initiative underway within a year. Knowing where to store the data and how to power the analytic applications that make this data useful to their business will be critical as companies look to make smart decisions for their big data initiatives moving forward.
