Why Liberate Your Data to Drive Better Decision Advantage in Government

Cameron Chehreh -

Liberating your data is essential to run both successful government agencies and enterprise organizations. It may seem counterintuitive to liberate your data, but it’s necessary. Everything is about data these days. The tools and solutions we use to run organizations, including AI, generate vast amounts of data. Although the data itself can provide essential information and is used across agencies and missions, too often, we gather and hold on to too much data. Managing exabytes of data to transform into insights comes at a high cost if teams rely on legacy data management practices and solutions. It hinders performance, analysis, wastes valuable resources, and ultimately, may comprise mission objectives.

How much data are we talking about? According to Statista, Exploding Topics, estimates on the amount of data generated worldwide in 2025 will reach 181 zettabytes (ZB). Additional forecasts predict even higher at 182 ZB in 2025. This presents several challenges for government agencies and their organizations as AI data continues to be generated and stored.

Strategic Data Storage
For agencies facing pressures of tighter budgets and expanding data sets, one of the most strategic decisions you can make is to liberate your data. Liberating your data means making intentional decisions about what to store, what to archive, and most importantly what valuable insights can be unlocked from that data.

It starts with the simple question of, “Why am I collecting and storing this information and how can I maximize its value to the mission?”

Liberating data is not simply purchasing more storage. It’s setting up your agency to be ready for an AI-driven future. This happens by aligning storage with mission priorities, optimizing efficiency, and keeping costs manageable while storing the data immutably so that it meets mission, compliance, and operational demands. 

Hidden Costs of Storing AI Data 

Storing unlimited amounts of data costs agencies more than just the actual storage costs. A terabyte of data that sits on a server or in the public clouds comes with financial, operational, and security obligations. Data then must be replicated, protected, and governed.  

Even after all that, data must be made discoverable for AI and analytics. Storing vast amounts of “undiscovered data” can slow decisioning or lead to flawed insights with disastrous results. Storing data without a strategic plan for usage means spending money and resources for information that may never contribute to your mission.

What MinIO means by “Liberating Data” 

Liberating your data simply means unlocking new insights and gaining visibility into your collection of essential information. This better enables searching for the new unknowns. And, searching while refining how and what the mission needs to collect in order to refine the information and derived knowledge that comes from these data sets. It means separating the data that is needed to drive decision-making and AI outcomes from the data that is required for compliance in your storage environment.

Top Reasons to Liberate Your Data:

  • Modernize Storage: begin storing data in a cloud-native technology that enables agencies the ability to operate on-prem like a cloud provider.
  • Relevance Matters: refine your collection, analytics and storage strategies. 
  • Feed Modern and Legacy Systems: liberating data means essential data is available and actionable for use across systems.
  • Future Proof Data: leverage the data you keep to meet current and future needs.

Liberating your data is not about doing less. It’s about doing things more strategically and with purpose. For government agencies and leaders, liberating your data changes the outdated and inefficient ways that agencies think about data storage. 

We can now think of data as a stream of consciousness and seek to continuously improve our insights and refine our collection within shorter periods of time. We are entering an era where data should be highly curated, immutable, and enable faster decisioning to meet mission outcomes. If your data doesn’t meet those criteria, set it free. Learn more about how MinIO AIStor works with government agencies and enterprises worldwide for AI object storage.