The Big Picture of Big Data

The Internet of Everything (IoE) is disrupting innovation models and causing market shifts. One of the most powerful IoE-driven opportunities will be the value created from big data and analytics. As IoE gains momentum and creates billions of new connections, each of those connections will be capable of producing data. The enterprises that can unlock the intelligence within that data — quickly and effectively — will hold the key to a powerful and sustainable competitive edge.

It has become the daily norm to hear about how a company or municipality is utilizing the power of big data —but invariably, these stories represent isolated use cases. I see a future in which enterprises will capitalize on pervasive use of big data – unlocking its power in a wide range of departments. And that future is not far away.

That’s because IoE is driving the creation of significantly improved access to better data. In about five years, 50 billion connections will have been inserted into critical locations within the value chain, providing not only insights into current conditions, but also enabling automated, real-time responses. This is the big picture of big data. And the intelligence that enterprises gain will deliver ongoing benefits: that data can be analyzed in many different ways, creating intelligence that can drive ongoing innovations. Consequently, organizations that apply that intelligence pervasively will enable new, game-changing speed and innovation throughout the entire fabric of their enterprise. They will be the ones who are setting the pace that competitors must follow.

No wonder a study published by Accenture and General Electric this month revealed that 87% of enterprises believe Big Data analytics will redefine the competitive landscape of their industries within the next three years. 89% believe that companies that do not adopt a Big Data analytics strategy in the next year risk losing market share and momentum.

Organizations seeking to make big data and analytics a core competency won’t settle for anything less than an infrastructure that is designed specifically for the IoE era—one that is:

Highly scalable to securely process the avalanche of data associated with billions of new connections

Able to quickly and predictably generate insights and enable actions from data whose value has a very short shelf-life (for example, video surveillance)

Programmable to deploy and manage what will likely be thousands of resources quickly and efficiently

Capable of supporting fast and flawless implementation of customized and powerful analytics solutions

The fact is that not all big data solutions are created equal. At Strata Hadoop World two weeks ago, Cisco shared our leading-edge big data infrastructure and analytics solutions to help our customers unlock the intelligence in their data. Our offering will ensure that customers can fully capitalize on the big data opportunity in the IoE era:

The fabric-based infrastructure of the Cisco Unified Computing System uniquely integrates server, network, and storage resources so enterprises can manage up to 10,000 Cisco UCS servers as if they were a single pool of resources to support the largest data clusters. The simplified and integrated Cisco UCS foundation is highly programmable, enabling breakthroughs in management orchestration and automation to increase efficiency and speed as your big data infrastructure grows.

To capture intelligence from both data at rest in the data center and real-time data at the data center edge, Cisco’s broad portfolio of UCS solutions provides the flexibility to process data where it makes the most sense, whether at the data center core or at the network edge.

Cisco ACI provides the network intelligence to increase performance, agility, and security for big data workloads by dynamically optimizing cluster performance in the network, redeploying resources automatically for new workloads to improve utilization and lower TCO, and ensuring isolation of users and data as resource deployments change.

Cisco’s big data infrastructure is supported by an extensive security architecture that’s designed to address the specific challenges of the IoE era, moving beyond static security defenses to a model that encompasses what needs to be done before, during, and after attacks.

And Cisco is also helping customers accelerate analytics solution delivery such as Data Virtualization software and highly strategic, custom-built industry solutions.

I invite you to listen to a webcast that summarizes how Cisco and our ecosystem partners can help you unlock the power of your big data and provide a significant and sustainable competitive advantage for your business. #UnlockBigData