Baseball is in the air. In fact, it’s in full swing. Naturally, I’ve been thinking of stats. You’ve gotta have stats. Like any major sport, stats play an important part in keeping things interesting. Baseball in particular, with its natural breaks between innings, pitcher changes, practice swings, and before stepping up to the plate, etc., meshes nicely with sharing important information with the audience. Stats can be fascinating and are perfect for anticipating what might happen next in a game or summarizing someone’s performance. And speaking of perfect, John Paciorek’s stats are perfect.
Paciorek’s major league career batting average was 1.000 and he never made an error. That’s right, no strike outs, and no errors. Paciorek played only one game for the Houston Colt .45s before injuries put him right back in the minors and then eventually out of pro baseball for good. In that one game in 1963, Paciorek made 5 plate appearances, went 3 for 3 (3 singles, and 2 walks), tallied 3 RBI’s, scored 4 times, and cleanly fielded all balls hit to him in right field. It’s what you’d call a perfect game.
So, how do you manage, make sense, and protect all of those baseball statistics? The cloud. Although a perfect game is rare, protecting data in the cloud isn’t. And saying that the cloud has become ubiquitous in today’s world, including the enterprise, is an understatement. Consider that more than 1 exabyte of files, including all of those wonderful baseball statistics, are stored in the cloud today. (1 exabyte is equal to more than 1 billion gigabytes.)
What does that mean? For one thing, it means that there is a tremendous amount of data in the cloud. That amount is testimony of the value of the cloud and the power behind cloud storage. The bottom line is this: The cloud has become an incredibly compelling destination for securely storing our data.
Consider for a moment just how much consumers who often times don’t think they use the cloud rely on the cloud. Here are some examples: Facebook, Gmail, Instagram, Amazon.com, Netflix, iTunes, YouTube, Twitter; all services powered by or living in the cloud.
The list goes on and on, just like the amount of cloud-based data continues to grow and be described in ways that most of us find a bit incomprehensible. Many bits incomprehensible! According to the Cisco Global Cloud Index, by 2018, more than three quarters of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers. The index predicts that annual global cloud IP traffic will reach 6.5 zettabytes by the end of 2018 (1 ZB equals 1,024 EB). Also by 2018, 59 percent of the total cloud workloads will be software-as-a-service workloads, up from 41 percent in 2013, according to the cloud index. What’s good for consumers is good for business.
Whether you’re accessing baseball stats, making a last-minute online purchase, or safeguarding your business’s info, storing your data in the cloud makes perfect sense. And EMC makes it all perfectly possible.