As the Internet of Things (IoT) continues to expand, proliferate and fragment, the ability to track the information it generates becomes increasingly important.
Information management company Veritas has reminded us that (in most typical organizations) firms today are sitting on roughly 30 percent of data that is now out of date, redundant, perhaps non-categorized or simply not part of functional production workflows.
Shadow of the mushroom cloud
The suggestion here is that in the context of the Internet of Things this data ignorance quickly starts to become a mushrooming problem i.e. devices, sensors and other tracking meters all produce a huge quantity of data that may not all be ultimately channeled into productive software application workflows, ‘codebases’ or analytics engines.
Veritas says that its Information Map product can provide an answer to managing this data, whatever location it resides in.
According to Veritas, “In terms of use, Information Map provides a visual experience for users to gain insight into an organization’s unstructured information. Presenting metadata in a visual fashion, the Information Map helps organizations optimize information storage and reduce information risk.”
How data mapping works
So here’s how information mapping works in the IoT.
Imagine a set of retail store sensors tracking customer ‘footfall’ across locations in North America, Europe and the rest of the world.
A user wants to be able to provide his or her management function with a slice of the information being tracked. The user types in ‘natural language’ – i.e. standard English – a query such as the below:
“Show me all data sets in the EMEA region relating to stores in Northern Europe that have product stocks on sale manufactured in Asia.”
In response, the software intelligence in the Veritas Information Map produces results – and it does so while aggregating an overall continuous and consistent representation of a global information environment.
“Without a proactive approach to understanding what you have, where it is, and what kind of value is associated with it, the risk hiding in your data could destroy your company,” asserts Veritas in somewhat bold terms.
The product aims to provide visibility into data environments to identify areas of risk, areas of value and areas of waste and deliver that visibility in dynamic form, so users can adjust the context to aid in decision making.
The company itself has been vocal on this product as it has recently been finessed in line with the Veritas NetBackup offering.
Designed for hybrid cloud environments, Veritas NetBackup provides data protection, recovery and insight into an organization’s unstructured data.
“Enterprises need visibility into their data to understand its value or, in some cases, liability. Together NetBackup and Information Map is the first [combined] solution to integrate data visibility and data protection, addressing the mounting challenges enterprises face managing unclassified dark data,” said the company, in a press statement.
Product note: Veritas Information Map is fully integrated with NetBackup to provide a visual experience for the IT team to gain insight into the organization’s unstructured data and global data environment
IoT data in the future
In the immediate, forthcoming, definable future… we can make some informed suggestions in terms of the way IoT data and the information that it is made of will be considered.
The Veritas Information Map renders unstructured data in visual context and promises to guide users towards unbiased, information governance decision making. With so much unstructured data populating the Internet of Things, this higher level of software based information intelligence may shape the way devices themselves are ultimately manufactured and deployed.
Related: 5 reasons why the Internet of Things needs data analytics