The Business of Data: Leveraging Storage to Enhance Workflow

Joan Wrabetz, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management, Data Center Systems, Western Digital Corporation And Vivek Tyagi, Director of Business Development, Western Digital Corporation India

Data is ever-changing, whether it’s for production, broadcast or distribution companies. There’s a change in the landscape of data. Data that was never before saved, is now being kept, and data that was frozen is being brought back online for either analytics or to enable the possibilities of monetization. Enterprises are increasingly collecting high-resolution digital content at each step of the way. With this, there is a requirement for saving, moving, processing and analyzing data. At the same time, the storage industry in India is undergoing a change, moving towards more advanced and innovative solutions.  Only with the right infrastructure to store, retrieve and analyze the data, collection is fruitful, as an enterprise can derive insights from it to drive growth.

I recently spoke with Dataquest India about building data-driven business models.

Here are four tips CTOs can follow when building a new data strategy for their media assets:

1. Focus on maximizing Economics of Data: An understanding of where data requires the economics of Big Data (a global market growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 18%) and where Fast Data is needed is critical to data strategy. In India alone, big data analytics as a market is estimated to grow eight-fold by 2025.
2. Data architecture strategy is different from storage architecture strategy: Data architecture strategies should be easily implemented for cloud scale operations running a simple architecture that involves a low Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The benefits include easy access to media assets and unstructured data, yielding scalability, the ability to combine file and object storage, and potential to bring in analytics and machine learning to a company’s workflow. For instance, enabling IP workflows that deliver 4K and Ultra HD (UHD) content efficiently and uninterrupted is of importance in India, as we strive to equip Smart Cities with reliable and productive surveillance camera systems, both for business and security purposes.
3. Move to hybrid cloud infrastructure: In terms of enhancing workflow, a hybrid cloud is flexible so that processing steps can occur in one or more clouds. Public clouds do not charge for moving data into the cloud, but data removal from the cloud is expensive. Therefore, most data is archived in a private cloud, and subsets of the data moved to the public cloud for processing can then be deleted once the application is complete. Hybrid cloud solutions, as a result, have increased in popularity for Indian enterprises, with players in the industry coming forward and offering hybrid cloud solutions. Further, with data in a commonly accepted format (such as S3), and being readily identifiable (as with a C4 ID), an enterprise has the most flexibility in choosing tools across different environments.
4. Leverage Object Storage: At the same time, building a large-scale storage system (preferably a petabyte-scale object storage with cloud-native S3 interface) would lend towards extreme durability to preserve and protect vital data. As object storage is designed to store data that is read frequently, its use is beneficial for media assets that are accessed regularly. By leveraging object storage to enable hybrid cloud workflows, an enterprise can plan materials and processes it needs to prioritize. As a result, increases in ROI and reductions in TCO are possible in a private and secure way, and will enable new, data-centric models.