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By David Rubal, U.S. Federal CTO & Director of Systems Engineering, EMC Backup Recovery Systems Division A recent Meritalk survey of 150 federal IT leaders found that big data solutions have the potential to save $500 billion per year in taxpayer dollars. That’s an incredible number, especially in today’s budget climate where agencies are being asked to improve citizen services and increase capabilities with fewer resources. Respondents saw the most potential in areas like data center consolidation, scientific data processing, joint operations planning, and fraud detection – but also in records management and eDiscovery. Analytics tend to dominate the big data discussion in government, but there is a storage and recovery transformation happening that has the potential to be a game-changer for agencies. Technologists talk a lot about unstructured data, which Grant Ingersoll of LucidWorks rightly describes as “data that doesn’t fit neatly into tidy little rows and columns”, and government agencies are facing an unstructured data explosion. Emails, videos, social media content and high-definition images are just a few examples of the valuable but storage-rich types of information that government agencies are now responsible for collecting, sharing, and archiving across a variety of applications and devices. The growth of mission generated web content is creating billions of new data objects for agencies to manage, often across multiple locations and for thousands of workers around the world. As terabytes become petabytes, the need for a cloud-based, object storage solution is an essential and strategic element of an agency’s overall data management and protection architecture. The cloud provides two critical storage advantages: scale and access. Cloud infrastructures enable massive amounts of data assets of all types to be consolidated, managed, secured, stored, and shared as a single entity. Information workers are empowered to access information from any device with a browser, and because files are automatically replicated within the infrastructure, agencies have built-in disaster recovery and continuity of operations (COOP) capabilities. We’ve designed EMC Atmos with these needs in mind, and we’re extremely proud of the fact that the product was recently honored by the Government Technology Research Alliance as a recipient of a GOVTek award for Best Cloud & Infrastructure Modernization solution. The solution is helping agencies securely build and deliver cloud-based services and applications on a global scale, managed through a single, centralized location, which drives dramatic efficiency benefits. Whether it be for an agency to recall a specific segment of a public safety surveillance video, a warfighter to leverage high-definition geospatial imaging to carry out a mission or the VA having the ability to quickly access a particular medical image of a wounded warrior, mission requirements are continuing to drive government’s use cases for big data The intersection of cloud and big data is bringing on a revolution in storage, and we’re just starting to realize the full potential in government. |
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