Data is Decentralized

An aspect I had never thought about very much, but very true.

" ... Let’s look at IT in a simple way. There are users, there are applications, there is hardware and there is data – just four distinct things that work together in one way or another.

Users run applications to create and manage data, whether it’s data in a database or in a file. The applications are, of course, shared to some degree. In the typical corporation there are thousands of applications, with each user employing only a selection of them. That’s easy enough to accommodate. Hardware can vary in its characteristics. Users have end node hardware (mobile phones, tablets, PCs, etc.), and to coordinate that we have networks and server hardware. ... 

Data doesn’t just need to be shared; in many instances it needs to be shared concurrently. It also needs to be secured, and it needs to be recoverable in the event of some technology failure. Those are, of course, largely solved problems, but they complicate matters. And what complicates life much more is that there are many databases and data files. ... "