Atos Scientific Community – Albada Jelgersma Conversation

In a recently published research called Ascent Journey 2016, the Atos Scientific Community considers the massive growth in data and storage as an important trend in IT.

Whilst the concept of Big Data has been around for a number of years and is relatively well understood, it is now becoming clear that everything we do is leaving a trail of data that can be analyzed and used.

Examples include the payments we make on a credit card, the books we read on an e-reader and our energy use by driving an electric car. This will lead to a new era of Total Data that, in turn, will lead to new business models, services and economic growth.

We don't yet understand all the implications of this – for businesses and society – but organizations that are able to harness and make sense of the vast quantities of heterogeneous data from disparate sources will gain valuable insights into market trends and opportunities.

An 'Ecosystem' of new management tools is taking shape, covering the various layers of the data stack in the enterprise and capable of delivering a 'Total Data' approach.

The technology that supports the Information Management Lifecycle in the enterprise is going through a profound change, due to the emergence of new solutions, many from open source background (NoSQL databases, Hadoop, analytical tools like R, visualization tools). To enable the 'Total Data' environment, the new technologies need to connect into and partly replace traditional technologies.

In some scenarios, data must be obtained, processed and correlated with insights being derived and actions initiated as close to real time as possible.

Yesterday's data is not interesting unless it helps predict tomorrow. Yesterday's traffic report isn't helpful in plotting a journey today unless it is known to represent today's pattern as well, and combined with other data can improve future congestion. Pattern Based Strategy enables huge amounts of historical data to be analyzed for previously invisible patterns. These patterns give us the power to start predicting what is likely to happen in the future, so we can plan and improve, both in real-time and in non-real time scenario-planning. For example, real time predictive analysis will plot the route for transporting donor organs across a city safely and quickly, continuously adapting the route to changes in the traffic patterns as they are happening. Another example is a country to make compliance recommendations (and potentially becoming a legal requirement) to companies for maintenance regimes for their infrastructures or industry plants using analytics on historic data and thus establishing an automated "what are the lessons learned" process.

Everything will be digital and everything will be connected.

Everything will be captured; "your life is becoming a video" – you can even replay your actions, thoughts and analyse in various forms and for multiple purposes (see http://quantifiedself.com/ for example); this is not only becoming possible for peoples life's, but anything that can be measured can be tracked, traced and put in a digital context for analysis. The ability of businesses to process this wealth of information is still unclear. What these developments – and others related such as 3-D printers and cognitive computers that will be able to replicate smell and touch for their users – mean for society, laws and concepts such as individual privacy need to be reassessed and will prove a huge challenge to governments, businesses and individuals in the 21st Century; for example long-established laws and concepts such as individual privacy need to be reassessed.

After an initial confusion phase, traditional and 'Big Data' orientated approaches to analytics will converge in a unified 'Total Data' platform.

Big data relies on its sister technologies of optimized IT networks, rapid mobilization communication tools and cloud computing. Data Analytics as a Service could emerge from a combination of Big Data, Pattern Based Strategy and Cloud technologies. Business performance can improve in areas such as increased forecasting and enhanced automation capabilities and buildt new business propositions upon the discoveries they can do using Total Data as a source of undiscovered information.

[This blog post is a rewrite of http://blog.atos.net/blog/2013/02/22/the-data-explosion-is-real/?preview=true&preview_id=1555&preview_nonce=6df2f23c80 ]

Times are changing and we all need to adapt. The internet has had a major impact on all of our lives and continues to be a growing force in all aspects of society; in personal interactions, in knowledge management and inthe way we do business.

In a whitepaper by the Atos Scientific Community, this evolution of ‘the net’ is described and put in the context of the additional functionality we now expect from our interactions on the internet. The authors challenge the current technology stack that is making up the many, many connections and network capabilities that have to be served to make the internet do what it is supposed to do.

“The topology of the Internet has evolved through economic and technological optimization decisions to a flatter structure where major content providers and distributors get as close as possible to the access networks used by their customers”

There seem to be good reasons to have a good look at this technology evolution and make some choices to continue to enjoy the internet:

Because of the cloud computing trend, more and more traffic is concentrated between several internet powerhouses; Facebook, Amazon, Google and Microsoft. The distributed nature of the original internet simply does not exist anymore.
Because of the huge increase in mobile internet usage, the way that information is accessed, changed and presented is different from the past models – the existing networking functionality is not optimized for this type of usage.
Future scenarios predict that through the assignment of an IP address to about any device you can think of we will create a huge peer-to-peer network, where human interaction will be only a small portion of all connections; “the internet of things”. The current internet technology is not designed for this.

These changes raise some fundamental questions and these are described in more details the paper. Most noticeable the authors bring our attention to the fundamental nature of the internet as it is built at the moment, a decentralized web of processing and access points.

“On the long run, the question is raised whether the Internet will durably follow a concentration trend driving it towards a more centralized network or if we will see a new wave of decentralization.”

The whitepaper dives into the technology of the internet and shows where we are facing potential bottlenecks.

[This blog post is a repost of http://blog.atos.net/blog/2012/12/03/watch-this-space-three-reasons-to-change-the-internet-now/ ]