Open Data Benefits

There is a big push on Open Data initiatives since this enables organizations to share data with partners and also build new innovative solutions. Open data maximizes value creation built on structured and unstructured data. Open Data initiatives should be based on technologies that can collect and cleanse data in a standardized manner so that it can be leveraged quickly and effectively. Open Data strategy and initiatives should also define specific requirements of what data will be made available based on the utility of that information.

The opening of data has many benefits including the analysis of patterns and determination of trends. The effective analysis of data including the ability to determine trends can lead to significant benefits, efficiency and cost savings and has application in many industries. Open data facilitates transparency, lower integration costs and enhanced collaboration among partners.

As the source of data, data sets provide the rich capability of information that can be used to build new applications. The challenge is to filter useful information from the huge data sets and render it in a meaningful manner. In addition, from a security and privacy perspective, opening up sensitive data has to be done in a controlled manner to prevent data breaches. For example Data.gov provides data sets and guidance to enhance public access and has thousands of data sets ranging from climate to food data. The data sets are organized in a catalog that can be searched. This also makes data available in multiple formats and hence strongly supports the notions of data transparency and accessibility.

There has also been an evolution of Enterprise Data sets that are standard, reusable data sets at the organization levels. These data sets also support consistency across analytic processes that can result in substantial reuse and cost savings. As a result, different analytic processes can leverage the same metrics and other attributes.

Many of these data sets are hosted on robust and scalable Cloud solutions to leverage capabilities that can be elastically provisioned to scale up and down based on the demand. Cloud facilitates rapid deployments due to quick availability of scalable services. It provides the storage, high service velocity to manage changes incrementally and less time for provisioning storage.

Big Data and Open Data will continue to have huge impacts on the storage and management of data across organizations.

(Please Note: All views and information expressed do not represent the positions and views of anyone else, any organization or any agency).