Big Data is one of the most popular topics in many industries – apart from many others: medical, financial, and cosmic, including earth observation. There is a reason that data is said to be the new currency. Correctly collected and analyzed, it is an added value for every organization. Data is used to build business models, perform all kinds of simulations, and predict future actions or events. However, big amounts of data may cause numerous problems. One of them is storage.
Cloud-based solutions
Big data retention costs continue to rise dramatically, so companies that store large repositories for Earth observation data are looking for solutions to prevent their loss and compliance issues as well as manage the complexity of unstructured data. The effectiveness of storing big data depends on choosing a secure and reversible cloud platform, affordable and with “pay-as-you-go” billing. CloudFerro provides cost-effective, scalable and reversible solutions for high-volume data storage.
How to store and manage big data?
Big data collections can be managed using a special cloud infrastructure like https://cloudferro.com/en/eo-cloud/storage-big-data/. Cloud computing and cloud storage technologies keep pace with large data sets because they offer adequate memory and computing power resources, and are also scalable – they develop with them. The cloud not only collects data, but also structures it using special software that divides it into blocks, and then appropriately marks and organizes it into the so-called clusters. This makes it much easier to manage and analyze them to gain valuable information.
Cooperation with providers of cloud services and big data solutions is very popular, because not every enterprise can afford to create and run its own, extremely advanced infrastructure.
Is there enough space for all the data in the world?
Data derived from earth observations take a huge amount of space. However, if technology continues to develop at such a pace, the Internet will not run out of space. However, people produce amazing amounts of data every day, and all of them need to be stored. By 2025, the global amount of data is projected to increase to over 180 ZB (zettabytes), and this amount will continue to grow and grow. Yes, that’s a lot of information. Nonetheless, according to Rack Solutions, up to 2.6 million servers can be placed in a data center of approximately 91,045 square meters. Companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft maintain these types of huge data storage centers, and research suggests they are not making the most of their capabilities. If we add millions of smaller data centers around the world to this, it turns out that we are not yet close to the global data storage crisis.
On the other hand, experts point to a different problem. Namely, that a much greater complication than “finding a place to store your data” may be “finding your data”. So the question is, as the amount of data grows and the storage capacity increases – will the tools for handling and finding exactly the information we need keep pace with us? We’ll probably see in the near future.
