It was with regret, 18 months ago, that I had to acknowledge, one Sunday afternoon while driving the family to see a film, that the only place my car was going was the scrap yard! A sudden horrendous grinding noise from the engine accompanied by a flurry of lights on the dash signaled the end of life of the timing belt, which meant the end of the engine, and therefore the car.

I tell this story to provide an example of how we end up reacting to events too late and often at enormous cost. It might have been different. After all, the data was there to enable me to benefit from a proactive insight; that strange intermittent grinding noise that I'd been hearing in the background for a couple of weeks and the smoking from what I thought was the clutch as we pulled up an icy drive. Yep, the data had been there; I just hadn't been listening properly; all I got was the opportunity to mumble "oh, that was what it all meant".

Massive amounts of data are being produced continuously as there are many more things, like my car, generating data 24/7/365.