How storage impacts the way organisations use data: Seagate CIO

Data has become an integral part of every business and the more data a business stores, the better the business can run, according to Seagate CIO Ravi Naik.

Digital Nation Australia spoke with Naik about how storage and data are interlinked.

He said, “Hence the demand for storage is continuing to grow exponentially around the world and it will continue to. Analytics plays a key role and will continue to play a key role, that means the underlying storage needs to be resilient, and customers need to be able to afford to pay for it.”

As organisations create data, storage impacts the way that organisations use their data, Naik noted. 

He said, “It's about data, gaining intelligence and extracting value from this data. The more data you store, the more value you can generate out of it because you now start seeing behavioural patterns, patterns for buying, for customers, and seasonal patterns, whether it be agriculture, or satellite imagery.

At Seagate, they have high-velocity manufacturing and as it goes through its assembly line, they use data to look for defects in their product.

He said, “We do that by image analysis, we do this high-speed image analysis that our analytics engine tries to look for defects. It is pattern recognition, there is a set pattern, and if there is a deviation from that in the image, then we say ‘this is the bad guy’ before it to the side.”

Naik said he is beginning to see a shift as more industries embrace data and analytics.

“You might not see a mum and dad grocery store do data analytics yet, but a grocery chain would. They would be looking at which food products to deliver within refrigerated units versus not depending upon the time it takes for transportation. There's a lot of intelligence that goes into planning the routes and planning the logistics of delivery,” he explained.

Naik said as the industry evolves so does the data use.

“We are seeing a significant change happen in the industry. We're seeing storage demand and demand for data grow dramatically in pretty much all industries,” he added.