Too much data is becoming a problem for companies: Survey

As companies continue to deal with an increasing amount of data, the sheer volume of data available to businesses is significantly outpacing its utilisation — in the form of data analytics and storage — in India. According to US-based software services firm Splunk’s survey titled ‘Economic Impact of Data Innovation, 2023’ published on October 5, nearly three out of every five companies in India are witnessing a faster growth pace of the volume of data that they have at hand — than the amount of data that they can store and analyse.

This showcases a challenge for companies, in terms of making the most of the data that they have at hand. However, analysing and storing data is not the only issue — according to Splunk, nearly two of every five companies in India also said that while there is an abundance of data, the quality of the same is either not adequate, or is largely unstructured. This, as a result, leads to stifling the potential to innovate based on the data that companies have access to.

The need to handle increasing demand for data storage is expected to boost India’s data centre capacity — in line with the demand for data localisation that the impending data privacy law is expected to make mandatory. Last week, on September 27, a report on data centres in the country by real estate services firm JLL India said that industry demand saw data centre capacities rise to 637MW (megawatt) in the first half of calendar year 2022 — up 16% year-on-year (YoY).

However, this rate of growth is tipped to be significantly outpaced as numerous hyperscalers and colocation data centre providers have announced facilities in the country. These investments include an $86 million data center park in Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra by US-based data center services firm Equinix, a hyperscale data center park in the same region by Japan-headquartered NTT, and more.

This demand, according to JLL’s September 27 report, could see the country’s data centre capacity more than double to 1318MW by 2024.

To be sure, the demand for data localisation and storage is also expected to boost demand for data analytics — which, as highlighted by Splunk, remains in crisis at the moment. On January 11, a report by employment analytics firm Monster said that 96% of all companies that use data could hire employees for big data analytics.

This includes a growth pace of over 33% in services and areas such as artificial intelligence and machine learning — which leads to the need for the use of data analytics to innovate and progress businesses, the Monster report added.