The Challenges of Keeping Up with Big Data

We're living smack dab in the middle of the data age. In fact, 90% of the world's data was generated last year. New devices and systems create crazy amounts of data, and every byte must be processed, stored, and catalogued in such a way that it can be easily retrieved from any device, anywhere. The IT industry refers to this as "Big Data," and how your business manages its data will determine your success in this new age.

Big Data is Slowing Down the Internet
Big Data is expanding at an incredible rate. You may be feeling the pinch at your office with your intranet lagging due to increased traffic. Outside the office, the world is experiencing lag as the Internet grows and performance becomes an issue. This is due to the complex and ever-growing Internet map becoming too large for older routers to handle, thus resulting in poor connectivity.

You may have recently experienced poor performance from your Internet provider. According to an August report by the North American Network Operators Group, your ISP and their older routers are to blame. The NANOG report saw performance issues across the board from companies like AT&T, Comcast, Sprint, and Verizon.

To give you an idea of just how big the Internet is getting, these older routers are designed to handle 512,000 routes and the current global Internet map has hit that threshold. ZDNet explains, "Routers share this map through what is referred to as Border Gateway Protocol routing tables, but when these routing tables grow too large for a router's memory, that router can no longer properly handle Internet traffic."

Sooner than later, Internet providers will update their hardware and the lag will go away, and as is the nature of Big Data, it won't be long before more global routes are added and these new routers become obsolete. In the technology sector, this kind of expansion in known as Moore's Law, and according to Twitter user Evgeny Morozov, "According to Moore's Law for Big Data (TM), the amount of nonsense packed into the term 'Big Data' doubles approximately every two years."

The expanding nature of Big Data affects your company's network. As more devices are connected to it, larger files are shared, and more applications are moved to the cloud. It's only a matter of time before your network's older routers reach their threshold and performance issues follow, causing your business to experience expensive downtime. When determining the cause of your network's poor performance, there are several pieces of the networking puzzle to consider, and your routers are a good place to start. Computerware can help you find and fix any bottlenecks on your network that are negatively affecting traffic.

Data Sprawl May Be Hurting Your Company
Data usage is expanding for SMBs; it's becoming more spread out over various clouds and networks, leading to a side effect of Big Data called "data sprawl." WorkIntelligent.ly provides us with a good overview of what data sprawl looks like for businesses:

In 2012, almost half (46 percent) of an organization's information is stored outside of its own data center. That's no surprise to any line of business manager that has field service, CRM, or portal applications. Couple those with Bring Your Own Device and other mobility solutions and you've got a recipe for runaway data. [...] smartphones and tablets now store 14 percent of business information worldwide, while almost 25 percent is in the cloud.

With your company's data sprawled out over so many different locations, and the amount of data consumed increasing all the time, you will need a well thought-out data management strategy. You need a plan that takes into account the growing pace of Big Data with scheduled hardware upgrades, and with your company's data spread out across different networks, you need a single data backup solution for your organization that copies all necessary files across your company's entire data sprawl.

Computerware can help your business manage the Big Data revolution to find success in the data age. Call us at (703) 821-8200 for big solutions that will manage your Big Data.