Industrial businesses are dealing with more data than ever before. For example, sensor data from a single offshore oil rig produces 1-2 terabytes of data daily. Whereas consumer devices, like a Fitbit, only produce up to 340 megabytes per day. That massive difference makes data management in industrial sectors considerably more complex.
Today, businesses are data-rich but insights-poor.
As more businesses become digitized, data will play an increasingly important role in growing revenue and increasing market share. Industrial companies know that data is valuable to their businesses, but they don’t know what data is most valuable or what data will be more valuable to them in the future.
So what do they do? They hoard it in the cloud or on-premise, hoping that someday, somehow, they’ll be able to monetize it into the value that big data and the Internet of Things (IoT) have promised.
Here’s the problem: Trying to make sense of all the data at a later date is like trying to find the one thing you desperately need in a badly organized junk drawer. Most of the time, it’s a fruitless search.
Data hoarding becomes even more concerning when you consider how fast data is multiplying. Within the next six years, the world’s volume of data will skyrocket 61 percent to 175 zettabytes, with nearly half of that data being stored in public cloud environments.
What’s more: Most companies are only using a small fraction of the data they produce — as little as 1 percent in certain industries — and when they do try to use it, they’re overwhelmed with where to start.