Parallels Between Tokyo's Evolution and the Future of Data Management

This summer, we took our kids on a family vacation back to Tokyo, a place they had visited six years back before they became teenagers. Interestingly, they felt the same awe this time as they had experienced during their first visit: This vibrant city of contrasts seems to harmoniously juxtapose age-old traditions with flashing modernity. 

Only in Tokyo can you see gray-suited business workers stroll down from multistoried gleaming glass skyscrapers to cool off in the peaceful zen garden of an 800-year-old Buddhist temple nestled comfortably amid these monuments to capitalism. You can see centuries-old Shinto shrines shrouded by the brightly flashing neon-lit manga shops of Akihabara screaming their approval of pop culture in all its glory, and the resolute pagoda of ancient Asakusa perfectly mirrored in the background by an unapologetically modern Tokyo high rise.

What does this city of apparent contrasts teach us about data management and the shift to data services? Just as waves of innovation and shifts in culture have enriched the lives of Tokyo residents, waves of storage evolution can also enrich the value of data. 

Whether it is on-premises storage or the cloud, flash or hard disk, or GPU-driven AI architectures, backup or ransomware protection services, data lakes or AI data pipelines, we know that while architectures shift and evolve over time, the data outlives all of these. Of note here is that just as Tokyo lets its citizens fluidly flow between the familiar comfort of Shintoism, the excitement of digital art and entertainment, and the serenity of Buddhism, the promise of data services is to let data flow across various services without getting locked into a single architecture or single vendor system. 

Related:4 Data Management Best Practices for Developers

Data services is the latest evolution of storage and data management and consists of a range of services typically provided by enterprise IT operations teams or shared services teams, such as: data security, data reduction, data protection, data storage, data analytics, data processing, and unstructured data management.

Data services shift the focus from the storage to the data — and there are three important parallels here to Tokyo:

Perhaps the next time you step through the vermillion-colored Inari gates memorializing that even the rich need solace, or you see the prayers written by anime-clad youth on a Tori gate, you too will be reminded of the richness that diversity offers in your profession.