Answers to many life’s questions lie in our data

So often in the technology industry we talk about how data can benefit businesses. And rightly so because data is arguably the most valuable asset a business has. However, we do not always talk enough about how data makes life better for people. When ultimately, this is its purpose.

A great example of this comes from a personal story about how a group of fellow technical scuba-diver friends and I have been able to solve a mystery of the ages using data. Data that has been available for a long time, but simply hadn’t been analysed with sophisticated enough tools to provide the answers.

The mystery was that of a shipwreck off Portsmouth, Maine, which I first learned about in a book called Due to Enemy Action. It was the last US Navy warship sunk in the Atlantic Ocean during World War II – two weeks before the war ended. A few of the 13 survivors claimed to have spotted a German U-boat after their ship exploded, but the Navy dismissed these accounts, believing there to have been no U-boats operating so close to the US coastline at this stage of the war.

No one ever found that ship, so my friends and I began an audacious mission to do so. As well as find the wreck, we wanted to answer the question of whether it was torpedoed by a German U-boat – the scenario the authorities had dismissed as impossible. Or, whether it had sunk due to a boiler explosion – an assumption will have had tragic implications for the engineers working on the ship and survivors of the tragedy.

After a five-year search, we found the ship. We also found the boilers were still intact, but no evidence of a torpedo strike at the stern of the ship. This has had life changing consequences for the victims, survivors and their families.

Much of the data we used to find the wreck had already been collected. It already existed. What had not been available to those who searched for it before we did, was the cloud and advanced data analytics tools. Data found the ship, and thankfully I get to tell the story.

At a profound level, it is a positive thought to think that we may have the answers to so many of life’s seemingly unanswerable questions. It is right there in the data – we have it – but we just have not found it yet.

That is why it is so important we manage and protect the data we have. It is an invaluable resource for business, a unique identifier for us as humans, and a resource that grows in value every day. As data’s volume and value grows, so do the threats to its security and privacy. After all, if we had lost the data we used to find that ship, we would have lost a piece of history – possibly forever.

Key takeaways

• Much of the data we used to find the wreck had already been collected.
• What had not been available to those who searched before, was the cloud and advanced data analytics tools.
• It is a positive thought to think that we may have the answers to so many of life’s unanswerable questions.
• It is right there in the data, but we just have not found it yet.