In a world of big data, how do you make sense of it all?

In the past two years, humans have created more data than in the entire history of the human race. That’s a crazy fact to think about.

So let’s think about it on a smaller scale. In the 2012 summer issue of Stanford Medicine, an article featured the chair of the Stanford’s Genetics Department and his project to generate billions of data points about his own physiology. The result? About 30 terabytes of data. Or, in the article’s words, “enough CD-quality audio to play non-stop for seven years.”

In the same report, data miner, Atul Butte, MD, PhD, an associate professor of pediatrics, stated: “Hiding within those mounds of data is knowledge that could change the life of a patient, or change the world.”  That’s another fact to think about.

Big data is important. And big data is certainly not limited to the medical field. But data is only as good as the insights we can gleam from it. Can you imagine if the 30 terabytes of data were in paper form? Butte would be hard-pressed to find the data’s hidden knowledge that could change the life of a patient.

In order to analyze data efficiently, it has to be managed well. Data imaging is one way this can be accomplished. Just think back to your days in school, was it easier to find a specific word in a chapter if you were just glancing over the paper copy with your eyes, or was it easier if you used Ctrl+F to search for the word on your computer?

If big data is overwhelming to you, make the task of analyzing it easier and effective by using one of Stevens & Stevens Business Records Management’s scanning solutions. It will be tailored to your business needs and produce results you can use.