Super funds have been warned away from investing in their own infrastructure capable of moving enormous amounts of digital information, saying the volume and scale of information would make it impossible for one fund to gather enough resources to cope.
Instead, super funds need to work together and share costs and technology talent to be able to create the infrastructure needed to move large amounts of client information, according to the chief executive of IQ Business Group, Graham Sammells.
Speaking at the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees administration conference in Melbourne, Sammells said it was too expensive for one super fund to invest in enough infrastructure that could deal with ‘big data’ feeds, and there wasn’t enough computer analytics talent available to deal with the feeds.
“Don’t even think about having the budgets and the capacity to invest in the infrastructure,” Sammells said.
Senior research engineer at national communications technology research centre NICTA Ben Lever said super funds had to take technology, storage and processing power costs into account when implementing a big data solution, he said.
There was 1.27 zetabytes of data in the world in 2010, and it was doubling every 18 months, he said.
Machine to machine information was causing a huge jump in the amount of data available around the world, including data input from social networks, smart phones, Twitter, and audio and visual data, Lever said.
Sammells told the conference that super funds needed to pool resources, but still maintain their own value proposition.
