RSS feedsAlbert Einstein famously observed that technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. And many finance directors could be forgiven for thinking they are on the wrong end of this axe, wielded as it is by IT departments demanding firms pay through the (bloodied) nose for the latest and greatest technology.
The blistering churn of IT innovation is more than enough to create very serious headaches for unwary companies. An excellent and sobering example of the way the march of progress can lead to sudden and unexpected technological obsolescence came into focus recently, after the launch of rival next-generation DVD formats.
In the blue corner was Sony with its Blu-ray technology; in the red corner was Toshiba with its rival HD DVD format. Despite winning the backing of industry giants including Microsoft, after only a few short months, the HD DVD format was dropped entirely, leaving all those who had purchased players or discs with, respectively, expensive paper weights and coffee coasters.
Just ask anyone who has all their favourite films on Betamax tapes what they think about technological change. While the death of the Betamax and Blu-ray/HD DVD formats most directly affect consumers, businesses are even more at risk of falling foul of technology’s inexorable march as the data locked into their systems is so much more valuable.
So a recent low-key announcement that some boffins in the US were developing technology to allow long-term storage of data caught the eye. The researchers at Baskin School of Engineering at the University of California are developing a new approach to replace ageing data storage technologies, such as tape libraries. Called Pergamum, the technology uses hard disk drives to provide energy-efficient, cost-effective storage. The idea is to create a distributed network of intelligent, disk-based storage devices.
Though not trendy or fashionable, the work of these boffin types is of critical importance for any company that uses computers and stores digital data. The scientists are trying to solve the problem of how to build a large-scale data storage system to last, not five years into the future, but 50 to 100 years. In IT terms, this is several lifetimes if you can imagine how information technology looked in 1908, then you can get some sense of the monumental scale of developments that are likely to emerge in such a mind-bogglingly long time frame.
But the hardware side of things is, unfortunately, the relatively easy part of the data storage problem for corporates. Far more challenging in terms of keeping data accessible for the future is selecting the right software format.
Storage of something as seemingly innocuous as electronic office files including spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents suddenly turns into a potential minefield. It is vitally important to ensure that this business-critical data remains accessible in the future, after the applications that were used to create them have long been superseded.
To achieve this there are a number of choices: should the files be stored in a format conforming to Microsoft’s OpenXML (OOXML) standard which has recently been ratified? Or, instead, opt for the OpenDocument format (ODF) touted by the Office XML technical committee, which is backed by among others Sun Microsystems and IBM?
However, in addition to HTML, ODF and OOXML there is a veritable alphabet soup of available formats in which data can be stored. The list, which has the capacity to bewilder even the most technically minded, includes Darwin Information Typing Architecture, Encoded Archival Description, DocBook, Extensible HyperText Markup Language, Maker Interchange Format, Open Mathematical Documents, Text Encoding Initiative, troff (typesetter runoff) and groff (GNU runoff). And this is before we have even looked at storage of core financial and business modelling data in formats such as XBRL.
There are many technologies that seem so much a part of our everyday corporate IT infrastructures, it is all but inconceivable that they would ever disappear. However, the transitory nature of many of these seemingly core IT components was brought home to me recently when I interviewed Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of the ubiquitous Ethernet networking protocol.
He kicked off by admitting that the technology he had so famously invented was doomed. He did quickly add the important caveat that the technology which would inevitably take over from Ethernet and replace it would be called Ethernet. However, this does not alter the fact that a technology seemingly so fundamental to corporate IT infrastructures as Ethernet is in a state of permanent flux.
In this highly dynamic environment it is clear that savvy firms must take steps to implement data storage strategies that are not only capable of satisfying their business needs today, but which are flexible enough to accommodate future developments. Failure to achieve this will mean that business-critical data assets could quite literally be lost forever.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
