Data needs 'standard shipping crates' says SAP CTO

The only true big data disruption will come from organisations working together, says Khan

Enterprises need to heed lessons laid down by the shipping industry and develop a "standard shipping crate" to carry data "off premise, off company, off territory and off region", according to SAP's CTO for global customer operations, Irfan Khan.

Speaking at the firm's Leaders Meet Innovation conference in London yesterday on a panel about technology and connectivity, Khan explained how the very nature of our lives today is making us "data hoarders", and in order to disrupt the log jam and start processing data effectively in an analytical sense, collaboration is required.

What's changed in recent years, he said, is "the way we're using information now on a day-to-day basis".

"Work, life and play is almost converging now. We're all at work now and then the idea of going home and having some play time doesn't exist anymore."

As a result, said Kahn, his own family has filled 8TB worth of network-attached storage in just one year.

"What's on it? I haven't had time for an audit," he joked.

"But the reality of the situation we're seeing is we're becoming data hoarders - always accruing information. But getting proper analytics against that data will be the true disruption," he added.

"In terms of transformation, the unfortunate situation is we still need standardisation. In large companies, be it BT, McLaren [who were also present on the panel] or SAP, we have to be participants in standardisation."

Kahn used the metaphor of shipping crates, and the ISO standard - developed between 1968 and 1970 - to illustrate his point.

"The parallel is, if you think back to the time when we were shipping goods into different ports, there was the creation of the ISO shipping container - the standard shipping container. Before the arrival of this, there was no way of being able to take things from a port to another port - machinery or goods or whatever - and deliver them in time because there was a mismatch; you'd deliver something from one location to another, and then figure out how to logistically manage that load."

Kahn said that the universal container "actually created massive bilateral trading opportunities between America and Europe".

"And where we're getting at now with data and our ability to transform and push data from continent to continent - that needs to be standardised. And so we need a standard shipping container taking the data off premise, off company, off territory and off region."

When asked who should make this happen, Kahn said that "ultimately, policy and policy-makers will need to play a huge role".

"Policy-makers in Europe haven't quite got their heads round it yet," he added, before reiterating that large companies also needed a "big role" too.

But international data storage and transmission is a thorny topic, particularly in a post-Snowden world in which government agencies are widely distrusted.

Fears over snooping were likely to have been further aroused yesterday when German Chancellor Angela Merkel again pressed for greater access to communications data by police. Meanwhile, UK prime minister David Cameron recently travelled to the US to discuss mutual support for greater government powers over public data, which president Barack Obama seems to support, as he tries to tighten the US's own laws.

In such an atmosphere of suspicion, can policy-makers really be trusted to come up with a solution for easier international data transfers that will be accepted by security-conscious enterprises?