There is data flood on internet. It becomes difficult for organizations to sift the data that is useful to transform their operations from a huge pool of data. Generative AI has made the data available on internet even bigger, though much of the data is useless for any organization trying to address a specific problem.

Of course, there is a need for big data for business analytics and to get AI solutions. Still, the data inundation in this digital age is fearsome. It becomes difficult to keep the company afloat in this data deluge. Larger storage is made available to deal with the deluge. There is lot of cold data not immediately required for data modelling. It may be used in future to build more efficient AI learning algorithms.

Internet produces several zettabytes of data, and the capacity to store these zettabytes falls short. Data increases at a CAGR of 25 per cent, causing a larger deficit in storage space. In the coming three years, the data could rise to 175 zettabytes. One zettabyte is equal to one billion terabytes. A terabyte is 1000 gigabytes (GB).

How to make sense of this data? Organizations use analytics. The team has experts in statistics, data science and number crunchers. They search for a pin in a haystack. Maybe, they deal with junk, and more junk is likely to be added as time rolls on. Data cleaning has become a humongous task. Much data remains floating on servers without being put to any use. It is not that the data is dirty. The issue is that the data is old. And data ages quickly.

Data storage requires mega data centers. This approach is not sustainable. There are high costs, and there is power consumption.

It is necessary to delete data that has not been used for several years. Let useless photos, files, conversations go offline forever. It is data purging. It requires corporate courage to purge data that is too old to be used. It limits useless computing and storage. The focus is on using relevant and real-time data. The analytical conclusions reached on the basis of such data are actionable immediately.