There are plenty of statistics around the staggering amount of data being created and consumed globally every day. 2.5 quintillion (million million million) bytes created daily by internet users, a 5000% increase in data interactions between 2010 and 2020, and so on.

Data is a valuable business asset, yet many organizations are still not managing it with the same rigour they apply to physical assets.

Recent Logicalis UKI eBooks and articles have focused on the critical role of data in digital business, from unstructured data and the role of Information Lifecycle Management to the importance of robust, business-driven data storage strategy.

As data becomes an increasingly valuable asset, organisations have to adapt, to manage and protect their data to ensure it delivers maximum value to the business.

There are plenty of informative and valuable articles on the web about trends in data storage technology, discussing everything from reducing last byte latency to the wonders of consumption-based pricing. Data and storage are hot topics, unsurprisingly in an age where, as Mckinsey puts it, ‘“digital” and “data” have become the talk of the town.’

Heritage technologies - mainframe, Unix and magnetic tape in particular – have long been a rich source for the ‘is x technology dead?’ debate. Technical pundits fill the web with head scratching over why they haven’t disappeared, or defences for their survival.

In challenging economic times, organisations naturally look to cut back or defer non-essential investment. IT spend has traditionally been one of the areas businesses look to first when the need arises to cut budgets or delay projects, sometimes creating a ‘good enough IT’ mindset, where any IT asset that is doing the job reasonably effectively today is maintained beyond the last responsible moment for replacement.

"Unix is dead, long live Unix" – a headline that is still as topical today as it was in 2009, when a blog with that title was published to mark Unix’s 40th birthday.

In its broadest sense, virtualisation can be seen as the progressive freeing up of any computing function – compute, storage, network – from the constraints of its physical infrastructure. So far, virtualisation has been a continuous evolution, from the first virtual machines (VMs) to the world of hybrid cloud, and there is no sign yet of this evolution losing momentum.