Heard on the Street – 4/20/2023
Welcome to insideBIGDATA’s “Heard on the Street” round-up column! In this regular feature, we highlight thought-leadership commentaries from members of the big data ecosystem. Each edition covers the trends of the day with compelling perspectives that can provide important insights to give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace. We invite submissions with a focus on our favored technology topics areas: big data, data science, machine learning, AI and deep learning. Enjoy!
Earth Day 2023.
Commentary by Glenn Stowe, Product Manager for Geospatial at MariaDB
The global climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time, requiring innovative and collaborative solutions to mitigate its impacts. By leveraging cloud computing, open standards, AI, and the democratization of access to space, we can unlock the full potential of geospatial data to better understand, predict, and mitigate the impacts of climate change. The importance of geospatial data in the fight against climate change cannot be overstated. The increased availability of affordable satellite imagery has led to an explosion of geospatial data, which in turn has facilitated a more comprehensive understanding of climate change.
Earth Day 2023.
Commentary by Alex Mans, founder and CEO of FLYR Labs
Advanced forecasting technology can empower airlines to optimize their flight networks, reducing empty seats and ultimately reducing carbon emissions. With the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning, airlines can analyze demand and revenue performance months in advance, allowing them to maximize capacity and fuel usage. As a result, airlines can not just generate more revenue and cut costs, but achieve fuller flights, which contributes significantly to a more sustainable future in the skies. While it’s important to consider sustainable aviation fuel and other green technologies as long-term goals, optimizing route networks and reducing empty seats is a tangible step that airlines can take today towards achieving their sustainability objectives.
Earth Day 2023.
Commentary by Shekar Ayyar, chairman and CEO of Arrcus
5G will enable an array of new services and AI applications to drive sustainability in various use cases like IoT, automation, etc. While 5G could drive an increase in the number of cell towers, higher bandwidth and power consumption, this can be offset by using software-driven platforms built on open networking hardware, rather than purpose-built networking hardware. This can sustainably drive digital transformation by supporting multiple applications and use cases on a single network fabric, with increased simplicity and performance, and can reduce the network’s footprint and power requirements.
Predictions for RSA.
Commentary by Shashi Kiran, CMO of Fortanix
2023 is an area of economic uncertainty and innovation. I expect this paradox to impact the security space as well trickling into 2024 and beyond. On one hand, we’ve seen the rise in data breaches and ransomware headlines, including from security companies themselves. On the other, we’ve also seen the power of ChatGPT and other such platforms capture headlines for their powerful AI. Couple these with emerging areas such as post quantum cryptography (PQC), the future looks both interesting and frightening. I anticipate a greater interest therefore in securing data at its core, through state of the art cryptographic technologies as well as in platforms that simplify the management of the entire lifecycle including for key management, certs, secrets management etc., at scale and across clouds including leveraging aspects of confidential computing. We certainly are seeing large scale interest and believe it is only the tip of the iceberg.
Transformational Benefits of Big Data.
Commentary by Misha Sulpovar, VP of Artificial Intelligence Product at Cherre
A comprehensive big data strategy can have transformational benefits to a business and its bottom line. Yet, to experience the true advantages of big data, companies must continually review and evolve their strategy, and ensure they’re embracing emerging trends, including metadata-driven data fabric, artificial intelligence (AI) automation, advances in process maturity, explainability and bias detection as well as generative AI.
Preparing for an AI-assisted data science field.
Commentary by Michael Grant, Senior Vice President, Enterprise at Anaconda
While the generative AI boom provides much problem-solving potential and excitement for how we will go about our daily lives, business decisions still need human brain power. There are dangers of hitting the autopilot button and potentially entrusting your organization’s data analysis entirely to a black box. Generated models might run afoul of data protection regulations, or include errors that are hard to detect or understand. Of course, generative AI is here to stay, and it does have great potential to empower individual users to accomplish tasks faster and more effectively than ever before. In the data science realm, AI can help automate certain data processing tasks, summarize the output of a model, or uncover missed connections and new insights. As we move into an AI-assisted future, finding a balance between artificial and human intelligence will be vital to driving a successful business.
World Backup Day 2023.
Commentary by Don Boxley, CEO and Co-Founder, DH2i
World Backup Day is an annual event that is intended to raise awareness of the importance of data backup and protection. It serves as a reminder for individuals and organizations to take proactive measures to safeguard critical data against unexpected incidents that can result in data loss, such as hardware or software failure, cyber-attacks, natural disasters, and human error. And, while the exact cost can vary depending on factors such as the size of the organization, the type and amount of data lost, the cause of the loss, and the duration of the downtime, according to various studies, it can cost organizations upwards of billions of dollars each year. That’s why, for systems architects and IT executives alike, zero is the ultimate hero. And to achieve it, they are taking a multi-pronged approach to data protection. To achieve zero downtime, zero security holes, and zero wasted resources, they are also layering-on smart high availability (HA) clustering and software-defined perimeter (SDP) technology.
World Backup Day 2023.
Carl D’Halluin, CTO, Datadobi
Failing to backup your data can have catastrophic consequences, as a single hardware failure, cyber-attack, or natural disaster can wipe out all your valuable information, leaving you with no way to recover it. This means that years of hard work can all be lost in an instant, with no chance of retrieval. Even the cost of losing just a portion of your important data can be immeasurable, with potential financial, legal, and reputational implications that can last for years. Identifying the vital data that requires protection should be the first step in the process. But even if you know and can ‘describe’ what data must be protected, finding it has always been another matter – and you cannot backup what you cannot find. To effectively address this enormous and complicated undertaking, users should look for a data management solution that is agnostic to specific vendors and can manage a variety of unstructured data types, such as file and object data, regardless of whether they are stored on-premises, remotely, or in the cloud. The solution should be capable of evaluating and interpreting various data characteristics such as data size, format, creation date, type, level of complexity, access frequency, and other specific factors that are relevant to your organization. Subsequently, the solution should allow the user to organize…
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