While big data is undoubtedly high on the list of invaluable tools a business needs today – and has been for some time – many companies are still struggling to use it. In fact, according to Square Root’s Data Chasers research, while 92% of companies wholeheartedly believe that big data will revolutionise their success, only 40% are actually taking advantage of it as it was designed to be.

There are obstacles that companies have been stumbling over for years, seemingly unable to overcome – but progress can be made with the right insights and perspectives. Here are the top four roadblocks businesses are facing with big data, and how they could finally beat them.

It’s too little, too late to make the change

Big data isn’t some shiny new accessory to speed up and improve your productivity. On the contrary, you can instead think of it as the foundation and structural beams of your company’s infrastructure – something that’s clearly not easy to replace on short notice. While younger businesses are better able to embrace the change, with new startups figuring it into their original construction, many businesses who’ve been in the industry for years are struggling to remake themselves as big data compatible.

It’s a steep uphill climb, but the key for established businesses trying to make the switch is to take meaningful but measured steps. You didn’t build Rome in a day and you’re not going to rebuild it in that time; instead, evaluate what parts of your business could benefit the most from Big Data, and what practices could make real changes in your productivity and interactions with your audience now. Apply those small but crucial changes and slowly work your way backwards. It won’t happen all at once, but it will give you valuable results where it counts.

The experts are in short supply – or aren’t the right kinds

Your current data experts aren’t to blame; they are skilled in their chosen profession and you hired them for a reason. However, the issue lies in the data world moving out from under them. New practices, tools, and developments in big data have made previously invaluable skills irrelevant, and calls for a new crop of data experts fluent in the modern lingo and tactics. The obvious answer is to hire on these professionals, right?

However, the universities are having trouble keeping up. Students are graduating as quickly as they can and older professionals are taking new courses to bring themselves up to date, but the issue remains. Businesses who want to leverage big data to their full benefit will have to accept that the right experts come at a high price and competition is tough, but it’s necessary.

They’re not sure what they need big data for

Unfortunately, many companies are approaching Big Data with the mindset of “if they have one, I want one too!” It’s undoubtedly a tool every company needs, but for different reasons, and if you acquire big data without knowing the problems you want solved or the insights you’re looking for, it’ll be useless.

While it’s tempting to build up big data as quickly as you can, it’s more important to put on the breaks and have your company take a long look at what actually needs accomplished, from developing converged systems to ironing out operational hiccups. If there are gaps in your information, then this is a place big data can help as well. Once you have a solid look at your goals, you’ll know how to refine the tool to work for you.

They take too much too fast

Think of big data like a massive haystack; the data you benefit from is also hay, but a specific kind of hay. Using big data properly is asking for the right type of hay, from the right haystack, and extracting it with the right tool. Unfortunately, many businesses fail to realise this and believe that all the hay is valuable – and the more haystacks, the merrier. In other words, companies often use too many data sources, too many data collection methods, and put in too many data requests, giving them plenty of results but none that are precise or actionable. This leads to confusion and false starts that hinder rather than help.

Instead, companies need to refine the way they use big data – and not get too excited. It’s about the right answers, not all the answers.

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Sponsored For those at the coalface of the security industry, the feeling of metaphorically banging one’s head against a brick wall, of continually educating, re-educating and correcting misinformation, mischievous or otherwise, will feel all too familiar.

Take the comments from Home Secretary Amber Rudd around WhatsApp following the terror attack in Westminster. Following the disclosure that the messaging service was used moments before the attacker struck, Rudd’s remarks – “there should be no place for terrorists to hide” – were met with a certain level of dismay in the industry.

Graham Cluley, a long-standing independent security analyst, put it this way. “There is a danger that politicians will take ghastly incidents of terror as a platform to push forward their agenda of weakening encryption,” he wrote. “It makes them sound tough in the fight against terror – at least to people who don’t know much about technology. But it won’t make a blind jot of difference to bad guys.”

With other technologies, such as cloud and Wi-Fi, a similar effect occurs. Last month David Linthicum, a highly-respected cloud thought leader, wrote about how the battle for cloud security in enterprises is increasingly not a technological one. “The truth is that competent cloud security technology is available, and most IT organisations’ cloud teams are good at finding and using it,” he wrote in InfoWorld. “To achieve solid cloud security, departments across IT need to come together, both those that focus on legacy and those that focus on cloud computing.

“In reality, this union has proven to be difficult. Why? The people down the hall are dead set against you driving change.”

One firm which looks at how employees deal with these situations is mobile connectivity provider iPass. The company issues a yearly report around mobile security, with last year’s revealing that almost two thirds of organisations ban their mobile workforce from accessing free Wi-Fi hotspots. In addition, 94% of respondents said free Wi-Fi was either ‘very much’ or ‘somewhat’ of a threat to their company. This is backed up elsewhere; Xirrus, in a recent report, found that 91% of Wi-Fi users did not believe it was secure, yet 89% continued to use it anyway.

Raghu Konka is vice president of engineering at iPass. He argues that ‘all security challenges are both organisational and technological to varying degrees’, but adds a caveat. “Education is hugely important, and employees need to understand that security is their responsibility as well, not just those in IT,” he explains. “However, relying on employees to do this for themselves, and to always follow best practice, is a sure-fire way to get hacked.”

One element of best practice which should be – but is not always – followed is around VPNs. The iPass study found that only one in five (21%) US firms polled were ‘fully confident’ their workforce always used the company’s VPN. “Employees still need to be more aware of VPNs as commonly the ‘last mile’ is where a user’s data is most vulnerable. However, by using a VPN, data is masked and encrypted, protecting people from the infamous ‘man in the middle’ attacks, and unwittingly exposing their online data to malicious activity,” says Konka.

“In today’s ‘Wi-Fi first’ world, it is imperative that mobile workers are equipped with the requisite tools to get online and remain productive, while simultaneously ensuring the security of corporate data from wherever it is being accessed,” he adds.

All that said, the onus is not entirely on the employee. Konka argues that employers taking actions such as simply banning public Wi-Fi will be a stop gap as workers will just find a way around it. “Getting employees to use VPNs, for instance, should primarily be a technology issue,” he says. “Employers need to provide zero touch technology solutions to cover employee misuse and mistakes, as well as any inevitable gaps in education, training and awareness.”

Sometimes, however, it’s a question of watching the watchers. Last week, an article on Motherboard debunked a service calling itself MySafeVPN, after it spammed a database of media player provider Plex. Among the various issues which led people to suspect the service was not entirely legitimate, the company’s sign up page had no SSL, its headquarters was traced to a Vietnamese restaurant, and some users reported visiting the website triggered an anti-virus warning.

As the Motherboard story argues, the emergence of operations such as MySafeVPN may well be linked to new US legislation which allows internet service providers to sell users’ browsing history to the highest bidder.

Konka hopes VPN services – reputable ones, that is – will see an uptake following the vote, which was passed in the House of Representatives by 215 votes to 205, but is not entirely confident. “General awareness around VPNs is likely to rise as a result of the ISP privacy vote, but we can’t rely on there being an instantaneous surge in VPN use,” he says. “When privacy and security are concerned, apathy regularly trumps reason.”

For those in the security industry, it’s a continual goal to make reason trump apathy.

This post is brought to you by TheBestVPN.com. Find out more about them here.

Even for the most seasoned IT pros, the cloud is complicated. It can be difficult just to wrap your head around the many terms and acronyms that make up the cloud dictionary-not to mention actually mastering the technology.

Unfortunately, complicated cloud terms are often combined to the point that their meanings are lost in a sea of conflicting opinions.
Two terms that are used interchangeably (but shouldn’t be) are hybrid cloud and multicloud. If you want to be the cloud expert your company needs, you have to lock down the differences between these terms-and understand how to manage a mix of these environments.

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Vendor revenue from sales of infrastructure products for cloud IT, including server, storage and Ethernet switch, grew to $32.6 billion in 2016 at a 9.2% year on year climb, according to the latest note from IDC.

The missive, which appears in the company’s latest quarterly cloud IT infrastructure tracker, found that cloud IT infrastructure sales, as a share of overall global IT spending, was at 37.2% in Q416, up from 33.4% this time last year.

Private cloud infrastructure growth was led by Ethernet switch at 52.7% year on year, ahead of server (9.3% growth) and storage (3.6%). For public cloud, it was a similar story; Ethernet switch (30%) and server (2.4%) grew, while storage declined by 2.1%. Revenue in traditional IT infrastructure – in other words, not cloud – decreased 9% year over year in the fourth quarter.

Looking at the leading vendors, Dell, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Cisco remain top, albeit with the former two losing market share and revenue year over year, finishing at 17.3% and 14.6% share respectively. Cisco grew 23.1% in revenue and 1.5% market share to 11.3%, while the biggest climbers were Huawei, moving ahead of IBM with a 61.4% revenue growth year on year. IBM, Lenovo and NetApp were tied for fifth.

iCharts

“Growth slowed to single digits in 2016 in the cloud infrastructure market as hyperscale cloud data centre growth continued its pause,” said Kuba Stolarski, IDC research director for computing platforms in a statement. “Network upgrades continue to be the focus of public cloud deployments, as network bandwidth has become by far the largest bottleneck in cloud data centres.

“After some delays for a few hyperscalers, data centre buildouts and refresh are expected to accelerate throughout 2017, built on newer generation hardware, primarily using Intel’s Skylake architecture,” Stolarski added.

Technology has always driven massive changes in the business of television. The movement from the Broadcast era to the Pay TV era was powered by the new technologies of cable and satellite. And the engine of the next major shift — from cable to OTT (over the top) — is powered by broadband video technology.
For the first ten years of the consumer web — circa 1994 to 2004 — internet video quality was laughable. Those of us who predicted that the Net would disrupt television were laughed at. How could a video the size of a postage stamp compete with ESPN? We queued up tiny videos to buffer on our desktops and waited, and waited for a 15-frame-per-second video that usually sputtered and died. As recently as 2006, video made up just 12% of internet traffic.

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Silicon Valley may be the epicentre of the vast majority of technological innovation – yet according to the latest note from Synergy Research, Dallas and Washington DC are the leading growth markets for colocation, headed by Digital Realty and Equinix.

The analyst firm noted that Dallas and Washington both grew at almost twice the rate of the national market, with revenue growth in those two areas, alongside Chicago, picking up ‘strongly’ in 2016. The top 10 metro areas accounted for almost three quarters (74%) of US retail and wholesale colocation revenues last year.

Alongside Digital Realty and Equinix, other vendors at the sharp end of the market include DuPont Fabros (Washington and North Virginia), QTS (Atlanta), and CyrusOne (Austin), with AT&T, CenturyLink, Coresite, Infomart, NTT, SunGard and Verizon also mentioned in dispatches.

“Colocation is an increasingly global market but also demands highly localised services focused on data centre facilities close to clients in key economic hubs,” said John Dinsdale, research director and a chief analyst at Synergy. “This combination of global and local factors has been a major factor in driving the ongoing industry consolidation. Another key feature in the market is the aggressive growth of cloud, which has helped the US wholesale market to grow twice as rapidly as retail colocation.”

Looking at the global perspective, a note from Synergy in January found that Equinix, Digital Realty and NTT are by some distance the three main players in the market, growing three times as fast as the overall market over the last four quarters.

The jockeying for position between the top three has also been of interest in recent months; Equinix purchased Digital Realty’s Paris operations – real estate and data centre facility – for approximately $211 million in August, as well as buying 29 data centres from Verizon for $3.6 billion in December. The previous month saw CenturyLink buying Level 3 Communications, as well as selling off 57 of its data centres to a consortium.