Information overload: why companies need to manage their data

If the worst side-effect of the industrial revolution was pollution, then what is the biggest repercussion from an era of digital transformation?

It is the widespread collection of data without any real thought as to how it might be stored and used, according to Anil Chakravarthy, chief executive of Informatica, a company that last week announced 150 new jobs in Ireland.

“In the early days of the industrial revolution, nobody cared that factories were causing pollution, but then came regulations to deal with the issue because ultimately it became something that society had to confront,” he said, speaking to The Irish Times on a visit to Dublin to open the company’s new European headquarters.

“Similarly, we are in the early days of this new revolution around data and so don’t quite understand all the side-effects from collecting so much of it. Increasingly, however, we have realised there are issues associated with it,” he adds.

Data is seen as having replaced oil as the world’s most valuable resource, as the ever-rising share price of tech giants such as Google and Facebook shows. But just as oil spills have wreaked havoc on our rivers and oceans, so data leakages have also led to difficulties.

Moreover, in addition to issues around safeguarding information, many organisations have been so focused on gathering data without mining it or analysing it well, that it has come to seem more like a burden than an opportunity.

Chakravarthy isn’t the first to note the rise of what has become known as “information pollution”, whereby such vast volumes of data are collected that it becomes hard to manage. But given that the company he leads is one of the biggest players in enterprise cloud data management, he is more qualified than most to talk about how we got into this mess and how we might get out of it.

“The problem for most companies is that in the past data was always an afterthought. You built a system or application and there was data associated with it. Then you said, ‘I’ll figure out what I want to do with that later on.’ That’s the reason why difficulties started around data privacy, because no one had thought much about the consequences of holding it,” he says.

“A lot of what you see, even with Facebook and the problems it has with fake news and so on, is simply because there has been a free-for-all with data. I think we’re increasingly realising, though, that, as with other types of pollution, it is better to clean up the spills at source, which is why new regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation are coming into force,” he says.

This is where Informatica comes in. It provides a platform that give companies a comprehensive 360-degree view of all the data they have stored across various systems both on-site and in the cloud, so they can better integrate, analyse and protect it.

The company describes itself as the “Switzerland of data” because its products work across multiple platforms.

“We’re focused on helping customers understand that data has to have its own architecture which can manage different capabilities,” Chakravarthy says.

Founded in California in 1993, the company went public on the Nasdaq six years later, but was taken private again in 2015 after being acquired by Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. Microsoft and Salesforce Ventures also came on board as investors following that $5.3 billion (€4.3 billion) deal.

It now employs more than 3,500 people globally, including about 100 in Ireland, and has annual revenues of more than $1 billion (€810 million). In recent years it has focused on introducing newer technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) to data management and compliance.