IDA Blog
CTO speaks: Of Sustainability And More
You may have heard news about the launch of the new
Green Mark for Data Centres
at the opening of the International Green Building Conference and BEX Asia, anchor event of the Singapore Green Building Week. A joint effort between BCA and IDA, the Green Mark aims to encourage better management and improved energy efficiency of data centres in Singapore.
Why the need for such a standard and certification you may ask? Today, proliferation of ICT usage, increasing cost of electricity and scarcity of energy and the rise of big data and mega data centres are creating sustainability challenges for the economy, environment and the society. We need to reduce the impact of data centres’ energy consumption to create sustainable data centre ecosystems. Introducing a standard with certification such as Green Mark would encourage businesses to improve efficiency of data centres, yielding substantial cost savings for the businesses and a healthier environment for the society.
A few months back, we also emphasised the importance of sustainability at the Infocomm Technology Roadmap (ITR) Symposium, where we provided a guide for organisations to understand where technologies are heading, so that you can stay ahead of the infocomm innovation and adoption curve, and find ways to harness infocomm technologies for optimal effectiveness and impact. In consultation with colleagues in the government sector, leaders in the private industry and the broader community, we have identified sustainability and eight other key technology themes in the ITR. You can find the details reports available on
/Infocomm-Landscape/Technology/Technology-Roadmap.aspx
. I strongly encourage you to have a look at these themes – and think about what it can mean to your business, be it on the consumer, commercial or even stakeholder fronts. What are the new values that you can create from it?
Take Big Data for instance. Digitisation has led to the generation of a massive volume of data. An
IDC study
projected data storage to grow from 1,227 exabytes in 2010 to 7,910 exabytes in 2015. With organisations moving toward being “data-driven”, business leaders are increasingly relying on data to make high-stake decisions. We can next expect a growing need to analyse unstructured data such as images and audio, which will unearth insights to augment decision making processes. Data analytics talent will possibly be in hot demand.
Adding to the data deluge, the pervasiveness of social media significantly increased the consumption of data. As an illustration, the amount of data consumed worldwide
every hour
can fill 7 million DVDs. In fact,
every minute
, we upload 48 hours of video on YouTube, 600 000 pieces of content on Facebook and 100 000 tweets on Twitter. Just a few years ago, all these content would not have existed. It was not until Facebook started in 2004 and Twitter came along in 2006 that we started to see such explosion of content on the social media scene.
Thus, it is no wonder that we see mega data centres built around the world to handle such a spike in data creation and consumption. As you can see, the convergence in technologies creates new challenges in the world, but it also creates new opportunities.
While we cannot provide you with a prescription of what to do for your business or an exhaustive list of all the trends and opportunities, we hope that our work here in IDA would help you understand and navigate through key technology trends. But more importantly, we hope that you will succeed in helping the infocomm industry in Singapore flourish and grow beyond the shores to make an impact in the global market.
Mr Leong Mun Yuen
Chief Technology Officer & Senior Director
(Technology & Planning)