NetApp tasks businesses in Nigeria on big data explosion

INTEGRATED storage solution provider, NetApp has called on businesses in Nigeria to prepare for possible increase in big data explosion, which it said was most likely going to enormous pressure on existing infrastructure.

The District Manager, West Africa, NetApp, Mr. Rex Mafiana, urged corporate organisations to ensure effective management of data generated through their Information Technology systems. Mafiana gave the advice recently in Lagos, during the ‘NetApp Big Data Technology Summit’, adding that proper management of data would give a company insight to manage the business. He said that universally, data had continued to expand rapidly and as time went on, companies’ data would continue to increase.

He said,  “Although human-generated datasets, including Facebook pictures and Tweets, are getting the most attention in the media, the biggest source of data growth is machine-generated datasets. ‘’Digital technologies are moving to denser media, photos have all gone digital, video and medical imaging systems are using higher resolutions, and advanced analytics require significantly more storage.”

Mafiana said the reason for the summit, which was organised yearly since 2006, was to sensitise the masses to developments in the technology space.

“30 million content pieces uploaded to Facebook every month, five billion smartphones create and store content, the estimated size of the digital universe in 2020 will be 35 zettabytes as the data growth rate is 50 per cent every year. The big data has become a big issue all over the world now because if something is growing exponentially over a period of time, it will soon become very big.

“Today Nigerian and West African organizations find their websites linked to twitter and Facebook, the millions of tiny data generated by these associations also yield another form of big data which can be harnessed for competitive advantage, this is what this event in Lagos, Nigeria is about – giving the sub-region’s businesses a heads-up, we need to be prepared in order not to be overtaken” and NetApp can bring extreme value in this regard”, he stated.