Nearly half of Canadian organizations have identified data storage as a top priority for 2014, according to a recent survey by technology solutions provider CDW Canada.
How to store corporate data is a growing concern for no less 47 per cent of Canadian organizations in both private and public sectors, the company found.
“Canadian organizations are creating greater amounts of digital information year over year,” said Daniel Reio, director of marketing for CDW Canada. “Whether its e-commerce transactions, security videos or analytics data, all of this information needs to be stored, and in many cases backed up.”
He said the survey also found that 29 per cent of Canadian businesses expect their storage needs to grow between 20 per cent and 50 per cent throughout the year. Another five per cent of respondents estimate storage demand to increase between 50 per cent and 75 per cent.
Related Articles on CDN
Analytics firm International Data Corp (IDC) estimates that the global amount of digital data will grow from 130 Exabytes in 2013 to 40,000 Exabytes by 2020. To put this in perspective, a retail giant like Walmart collects more than 2.5 Petabytres of data every hour from customer transactions.
As organizations realize the potentials of analyzing unstructured data to better understand business process and customer needs, the focus on big data continues to grow as well among Canadian companies.
Big data comes in many forms. It can come from images posted on Facebook, comments on other social media sites, email, text messages, GPS signals from mobile devices, tweets and other forms of data.
Some 20 per cent of respondents believe that big data will be “impactful to their business,” according to CDW.
While many elements of computing such as storage, memory, processing and bandwidth are becoming cheaper, a large number of traditional systems are still geared towards handling structured data or data contained is fixed fields within a record, file or databases.
Structured databases that store most corporate information are not well suited for storing and processing big data.