Welcome to the May eNewsletter from Storage magazine, which includes an enlightening -and possibly controversial - opinion piece from Matillion's Molly Sandbo on the 'real' value of data. Molly argues that there is an increasing perception that the more data any given organisation has, the more successful that organisation must be - and clearly there's a lot more to it than that!

In the cloud, says the article, data "behaves differently": as it expands, it becomes more fragile both in terms of accessibility and integrity. And in the case of Black Swan events such as supply chain disruption or global pandemics, data teams often struggle to make sense of the vast amounts of data, rendering it almost useless.

"Big data went through a long hype period, during which many promises were made about its potential that ultimately left some businesses disappointed," says Molly. "Big data is indeed often the right data, but having large quantities of it is not enough for organisations if they are to succeed in the data race. Having too much data can be like having too many cooks in the kitchen - beyond a certain point, the value of each new byte of data diminishes."

One report by the UK's DCMS suggested that 46% of UK companies have been struggling to hire data professionals over the last couple of years, which proves that there are simply not enough workers with the skills necessary to manage existing data, both in terms of demand for data and the sheer volume of it. Increasingly, organisations must adopt a strategy for their analytics programmes that empowers and supports the needs of modern data teams.

David Tyler, Editor
Storage magazine

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