Q. What is driving data growth and how are enterprises looking to leverage it?

In the last few years, we have seen a humongous growth in data and this will continue to grow at an unprecedented scale. Availability of smartphones at every price point, 4G penetration and availability of data a low cost, emergence of gaming, IOT applications, and smart video adoption are some of the main triggers in driving data growth in India. It’s not a surprise that India’s external storage market that includes external hard drives and SSDs, pen drives and personal cloud storage drives has witnessed a growth of 8.0% year-on-year, according to IDC’s latest enterprise storage systems tracker for the third quarter of 2019. 

We believe that machine generated data will being to surpass human data in 2020. The non-mobile edge applications – from medical, automotive, industry, smart cities, airports, and more – will continue growing rapidly. Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) and natural streaming data (video, AI/ML datasets, etc.) will contribute to the largest share of growth, driving the need for new at-scale, TCO-optimized data center architectures to help IT and business leaders efficiently store, manage, and monetize the value of their data.

Enterprises understand the importance of data; they are treating and leveraging it as a strategic capital asset. Western Digital is well positioned to help enterprises with their various data storage requirements. We continue to delivering more value and TCO at scale to our customers, ans we have recently announcement 18TB CMR and 20TB SMR HDDs . We are committed to develop and execute across the data technology stack – from NAND components to devices to platforms – to enable enterprise data to unlock even more value.

Q. What kind of storage demand do you see from the enterprises? Is it more for physical infrastructure/on prem or the Cloud? Please explain.

The right data infrastructure will enable enterprises to not only to store data correctly but also to use the data in the best way possible. Therefore, enterprises are continually looking for enterprise-class storage solutions that are customized for their requirements i.e., product and solutions customized for big data and fast data needs. They will continue to use a mix of cloud, and one premise storage, as required by different applications and use-cases.

Q. What are the reasons for growth of data storage among enterprises?

Enterprises across segments understand the potential data brings to unlock the new opportunities. They are analyzing the data by using various computations, algorithms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, to unmask trends, patterns, and associations that provide valuable insights, new data connections, and precise predictions that can help achieve better outcomes. Therefore, they are saving vast amount of data, because, today organizations are not only capturing data but they are enabling it, i.e., extracting value from it.

It is important to note that extreme big data workloads demand advanced storage infrastructures with purpose-built capabilities. We offer a portfolio of products and solutions, across a range of market segments, to enable customers to extract value and derive meaningful insights from big data.   

Q. With the emergence technologies such as AI, IoT, ML, does storage becomes important and why?

We live in a connected world, where more and more objects are carrying digital identity and are connected to each other and to humans. These objects are made searchable to explore new possibilities and at the heart of it is ML. The success and promises of ML is solely depended on the data extracted; it relies on a massive amount of multiplications and additions between a multitude of data and parameters. For example, to discern one human behavioral pattern, ML can require thousands of hours of video footage. ML ultimately leads to very competent AI, but it needs a vast amount to data to become intelligent. Therefore the opportunity to extract actionable insights is driving enterprises to hold onto more data, and hold onto it longer, therefore resulting in data storage growth even further.

Q. Can you please cite example from varied industry verticals as to how data and storage is playing a significant role in their digital journey?

Almost every industry, today, is leveraging data to create value.  Let’s take an example of manufacturing. The sector is using data as a huge strategic assets in order to transform into smart factories. Another example is the auto industry. Look at your cars today, they are using data to enhance consumer experience. Whether it is the automatic braking and adaptive cruise control, or the new applications built into the cars such as dash camera, reconfigurable instrument cluster, ADAS, and autonomous computer, data is at the heart of it all. Likewise, security video to smart security video is all because of data.