New Year, New Data Strategy: How AI And Scalable Storage Shape 2025’s Resolutions

COMMISSIONED: The new year has arrived, bringing with it the usual resolutions: get fitter, read more books, maybe finally tackle that ever-growing email backlog.

But for tech leaders, this time of year isn’t just about personal betterment; it’s about rethinking how to unlock business value. And in 2025, one resolution towers above all: Getting your data strategy AI-ready.

Let’s face it, data is the lifeblood of modern business, but without a solid infrastructure, it’s like trying to train for a marathon by eating donuts and binge-watching TV. (Tempting, but not effective.) The explosive growth of AI has made it crystal clear that traditional data systems – those dusty warehouses and disjointed lakes – are holding organizations back. This year, it’s all about building a scalable, secure, and flexible data strategy that doesn’t just keep up with AI but accelerates it.

According to GlobalData, by this year, global data creation is forecasted to exceed a mind-boggling 175 zettabytes.  A significant chunk of that data will likely include unstructured data like images, videos, and text.  AI thrives on this diversity but only if your data strategy can handle it. Unfortunately, many organizations are leveraging legacy systems designed to manage spreadsheets, not neural networks.

Remember dial-up internet (I bet many of you can even recall the sound)? Slow, clunky, and completely unsuited to today’s needs. That’s what legacy data systems feel like in an AI-powered world. Traditional data warehouses weren’t built for the massive throughput, variety, and velocity of modern AI workloads. Worse, they struggle to support semi-structured and unstructured data – the very types AI feeds on.

To add insult to injury, fragmented data across silos makes it nearly impossible to draw actionable insights. Data lakes were supposed to fix this but often turned into data swamps – disorganized, inaccessible, and riddled with performance bottlenecks.

Enter 2025’s shiny new alternative: the AI-driven data platform.

A Resolution Worth Keeping: The Dell AI data platform

Let’s pause the doom and gloom and talk solutions. The Dell Data Platform for AI is like upgrading from that rusty, old station wagon (your legacy system) to a sleek, self-driving EV (AI-ready infrastructure). Here’s how it powers your data strategy to meet the demands of AI:

  • Open, flexible, and secure architecture

The platform’s open design supports a wide variety of data types and sources. Whether you’re working with structured sales data, semi-structured IoT logs, or unstructured video content, the Dell Data Platform for AI ensures everything is accessible, queryable, and ready for analysis.

  • High performance for GPU-accelerated workloads

AI workloads demand serious compute power, and GPUs are the engines of choice. The platform is engineered to maximize performance, from model training and inferencing to checkpointing during development. It scales effortlessly, letting you process petabytes of data without breaking a sweat.

  • Unified Dell Data Lakehouse with Dell PowerScale

Forget the chaos of separate systems. The Dell Data Lakehouse unifies storage and compute, enabling high-speed querying and analytics. Dell PowerScale’s scale-out storage architecture is optimized for AI, ensuring seamless data flow for model refinement and development. It’s the ultimate tool for turning disorganized lakes into productive powerhouses.

Why Data Governance Is Your Secret Asset

AI is only as good as the data that feeds it, and this is where data governance comes into play. Poor governance leads to biases, inaccuracies, and costly compliance issues. With the Dell Data Platform, organizations gain self-service access to high-quality data while maintaining control over security, privacy, and compliance. Think of it as the Marie Kondo of data – keeping everything tidy and purposeful.

AI’s impact isn’t limited to tech giants. In media and entertainment, for example, AI-driven workflows have transformed movie-making. Think advanced visual effects rendering, real-time editing, and personalized viewer recommendations. At the heart of it all? Scalable storage solutions like Dell PowerScale.

Meanwhile, in manufacturing, predictive maintenance and automated quality checks are becoming standard thanks to AI models trained on enormous datasets. The same principles apply – flexible, high-performance storage makes these innovations possible.

This year, 75 percent of enterprises will shift from piloting to operationalizing AI, driving a 5x increase in streaming data volumes according to Gartner’s AI Adoption Trends 2023 report. And in its 2023 Overcoming Data Siloes in AI report, McKinsey and Company estimates that over 60 percent of companies cite data silos as the biggest obstacle to scaling AI. Elsewhere, Forrester’s State of AI in Enterprises report published in 2024 indicates that AI adoption has grown 270 percent in the past four years, and it’s not slowing down.

These stats underscore the urgency of modernizing your data infrastructure. Staying ahead of the curve requires not just investment but a strategic shift in how you think about data.

2025’s Data Strategy Checklist

Ready to kickstart your resolution? Here’s a quick, five-step checklist:

  • Audit your current data architecture: Identify gaps and pain points.
  • Embrace unified platforms: Eliminate silos with a solution like the Dell AI Data Platform.
  • Invest in scalable storage: Prioritize systems designed for high-performance AI workloads.
  • Focus on governance: Implement robust policies to ensure data quality and compliance.
  • Plan for the future: Choose solutions that can evolve with your business.

This year is a perfect opportunity to reimagine your data strategy. By adopting AI-ready, scalable storage solutions, you will do more than keep up with 2025’s challenges – you’ll thrive in them. So ditch the old dial-up mindset and embrace the high-speed potential of a modern data platform. Your AI models (and your business) will thank you.

Happy New Year – here’s to resolutions worth keeping!

For more information about Dell Data Platform for AI, please visit us online at www.delltechnologies.com/powerscale.

Brought to you by Dell Technologies.

Amanda Burkhardt is a senior consultant in product marketing at Dell Technologies.

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