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It is widely expected that the UK Investigatory Powers Bill will be implemented by the government this Autumn. A feature of the recent Queen's speech, the first of the new parliament, and then validated by the findings of an independent report, commissioned by the Home Office and carried out by David Anderson QC, the bill upholds the right of police and security agencies to gather communications data in bulk and to monitor phone and internet usage. Now colloquially referred to as the 'Snoopers' Charter', the ethical implications of the bill are already being heavily debated by privacy campaigners and opposition politicians alike. Regardless, whether morally just or not, there is a far more practical issue facing the IT industry and enterprises affected by the bill which has so far been ignored - how will this bill add to the already unsolved challenge of the big data explosion?

In this digital world, data is the new currency. Big data means companies of all shapes and sizes are collecting more information about us, creating profiles based upon the websites we browse or the brand of good we purchase. This mass of seemingly innocuous data is then analysed and turned into real business intelligence, harnessed by companies to drive sales and performance.

However, from a business perspective, we already have more data than we can cope with, and forcing internet service providers (ISPs) and mobile operators to collect even more will simply exacerbate the situation. The industry has gone into overdrive to solve this data challenge, exploring new technologies that can efficiently crunch large quantities of data within tolerable elapsed times. Indeed, innovation has spanned the spectrum of advanced data analytics and search-based applications to parallel-processing databases and data-mining grids. More recently, cloud-based infrastructure has been playing its role in alleviating the pressure but, nevertheless, there is simply so much data, businesses are finding it difficult see the wood for the trees.

What is becoming clearer, though, is that storage is the critical bottleneck. While other aspects of data centre infrastructure have received heavy investment, storage has not been given the same attention. Consequently, many businesses are still reliant on traditional legacy setups, static solutions that were never developed to cope with the avalanche of big data - nor are those same systems deployed at the ISP level going to be able to house the amount of data the Home Secretary's new bill is mandating for. Further complicating the situation is proprietary hardware and the fact that storage systems were once designed to deploy from a single location. Not only does this make the architecture rigid to changing demands, but it also means they can't meet the highest standards of data security.

Thankfully, there is another way - Software Defined Storage (SDS). Developed to give storage the same operational efficiency as the rest of the data centre, SDS empowers businesses with high-performance agile infrastructure. It's flexible and scalable, meaning it can adapt to the varying pressures of Big Data without choking, thus ensuring mass data collection can be turned into valuable, actionable business intelligence. SDS also provides consistent high performance and streamlined data flow - achieved through capabilities including automatic deduplication - ensuring information is easily retrievable and that high-density applications can be deployed on demand.

SDS represents sustainable and affordable IT investment, capacity can be added with ease. For example, if a company can see their SAN is nearing its limit, they are able to simply buy more and cluster. Equally, being hardware-agnostic, SDS solutions will fully integrate with their existing data centre hardware, no matter the make.

Ultimately, faced with the challenges presented by Big Data, the continued proliferation in data generation, and the requirements of the surveillance bill, businesses can no longer rely on legacy storage technology. Its rigid structure and high upgrade costs mean it is simply not suitable for today's data-everywhere world.
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