It seems like only a few years ago that managing data growth was a high-priority objective for most users. What happened? The short answer is the same thing that happened to oil. Data is the new oil. Before we learned how to use petroleum-based products effectively, oil was little more than a pollutant.

It killed crops, poisoned animals and made land worthless. Then we learned how to lower the cost of extracting, refining it into kerosene for lighting, gasoline for cars and planes, and lubricants. Costs dropped, a competitive market evolved, and oil became the new gold. That paradigm is now repeating itself with data. We have lowered the cost of storing, managing, and using data to the point where economics and the size of the problems we are tackling have made it an indispensable tool.

Source: datanami.com
Author: Stanley Zaffos