Articles about Data

As the volume of data continues to grow at an unprecedented rate, organizations often struggle to manage the health and quality of their data sets.

To deal with this IBM has announced that it's acquiring Israel-based Databand.ai, a provider of data observability software that helps organizations fix issues with their data, including errors, pipeline failures and poor quality before it impacts their bottom-line.

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The benefits of 5G could be worth up to £7bn ($8.5bn) a year to the UK economy by 2030, but more needs to be done to ensure the country doesn't miss out on the benefits.

Research from Vodafone shows that while the 5G rollout has so far focused on major cities, towns and smaller cities are at risk of losing out.

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The increasing threat of data breaches and ransomware is leading more business to encrypt all of their data according to a new report.

The report, from hardware-encrypted USB drive maker Apricorn, is based on a study of 100 UK IT decision makers carried out by Vanson Bourne and finds 47 percent now require the encryption of all data both at rest and in transit.

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Web scraping -- collecting data from websites -- has been around almost as long as the internet has existed. But recently it's gone from a little-known niche to a serious activity, using automation to collect large amounts of information.

We spoke to Julius Černiauskas, CEO of data acquisition company Oxylabs to find out more about web scraping and how it has evolved.

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The phrase "information is the new oil" is tossed about with relative abandon these days. Data is undoubtedly one of the most critical elements in a successful 21st century business, but its utility only becomes apparent after it has been subjected to some kind of thoughtful analysis.

For many businesses, this is where the struggle begins; how can we extract meaningful insights from data quickly, efficiently and effectively? How do we shorten the lag between the moment a new data point is generated and the time that data becomes available to business analytics tools or a real-time machine learning (ML) model?

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Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS) is the most important factor in competitiveness, say 74 percent of companies in a new survey.

The research, carried out by Forrester Consulting for Celigo, also shows that 67 percent of respondents from organizations that don't have iPaaS say a lack of visibility into the data needed to make real-time decisions and a lack of data integrity due to manual data entry, delays, incompleteness and errors are major challenges of their firms' current SaaS landscapes.

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Almost all (99 percent) of IT decision makers say they have backup strategies in place, but 26 percent admit they were unable to fully restore all data or documents when recovering from a backup.

These findings come from a survey conducted for encrypted USB drive company Apricorn by Vanson Bourne, which also finds that 27 percent have automated backups to both central and personal repositories.

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Of the many challenges thrown up by the pandemic, the switch to remote working has perhaps been one of the most significant.

How have organizations coped with this change, what will the long term effects be and what's the role of data in making hybrid work possible? We spoke to Mark Devereux, CTPO of Scalable Software, to find out.

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Data and analytics are instrumental to helping organizations successfully solve problems and 84 percent of organizations have either already deployed or have data-driven projects on their roadmaps.

A new study from Foundry shows data-driven projects continue to accelerate as 34 percent of organizations state that they have already deployed or implemented them compared to 28 percent of organizations saying the same in 2021.

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Change introduces risk. It’s one of those foundational principles of software development that most of us learned very early in our careers. Nevertheless, it always seems to keep cropping up in spite of those repeated life lessons. Our inability to foresee the impact of changes, even small ones, often leads to negative outcomes.

As the complexity of interconnected IT systems has increased, this problem has grown worse. It’s harder and harder to predict how even a small modification might impact systems upstream or downstream of the change. Data lineage accomplishes that, but it’s extraordinarily difficult to do data lineage well.

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While 'data is the new oil' has become something of a cliché, it's undeniably true. Gartner reports that 90 percent of corporate strategies will explicitly class information as a critical enterprise asset by the end of 2022. Yet, information can only be powerful when it is put to work. Which is why the UK government and industry regulators (such as Ofwat) have set out strategies that encourage organizations to put data to use.

However, making data usable isn't always straightforward. Data doesn't come pre-packaged into customer next best actions and strategic tips. In fact, data analysis is often compared to panning for gold. Not all data is useful and you need to connect the dots to make it relevant -- when you consider the volume of data managed by the average company has grown to 162.9TB, that's one big river to pan.

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A new study shows that 63 percent of the UK population distrust social media due to privacy concerns and what's more as a result of privacy issues or other public scandals involving social media, 30 percent of consumers have either disabled social media (17 percent) or plan to within the next 12 months (13 percent).

The research, from digital experience company Acquia, shows only 27 percent say they would be willing to part with more data to retain access to platforms. While 48 percent indicate that recent revelations about data sharing practices have led to them using social media less often.

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Despite the fact that the world has become increasingly data-driven, a new global study shows that organizations increasingly face problems getting the right data in the right place for making critical business decisions.

The research, conducted by Dimensional Research for data integration specialist Fivetran, finds that 82 percent of companies are making decisions based on stale information.

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Although 81 percent of respondents to a new survey say that their data team's overall productivity has improved in the last 12 months, 95 percent of teams are still at or over their capacity.

The study of over 500 US-based data scientists, data engineers, data analysts, enterprise architects and chief data officers by Ascend.io finds automation is emerging as the most promising path to increase data team capacity and productivity.

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Today is World Backup Day, which is a good opportunity to remind you that you only have a couple of days left to get your hands on some free backup software courtesy of our AOMEI giveaway.

It's also an opportunity to look at the continued importance of backups even in the modern world of clouds and SaaS applications. A new report from Crucial highlights the ongoing cost of data breaches which has risen 9.8 percent from 2020 to 2021.

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