Dive Brief:

• Waste Industries has announced a new partnership with the data company Actifio to upgrade its systems and become more prepared for the coming "Internet of Things" (IoT) trend. “Our IT is years ahead of most companies in our industry,” said Waste Industries Head of IT Hubert Barkley in a case study released by Actifio. “As we gain more market space through acquisitions, our ability to consume data into our environment will be a powerful competitive asset."
• By shifting its data to Actifio's system, Waste Industries has reportedly cut down on storage costs and increased response times. Its recovery point objective has been reduced from 24 hours to two hours and recovery time objective has been reduce to "only a few minutes."
• This new system is also seen as a way to make Waste Industries' data more secure from security risks such as ransomware attacks and improve disaster recovery time. On its previous system disaster recovery would have taken 48 hours as compared to eight hours with Actifio.

Dive Insight:

This partnership reportedly began last year when the North Carolina-based Waste Industries began looking for ways to improve the responsiveness of its data systems without paying for significant equipment upgrades. The data loads were expected to increase as the company continues to collect more information from its fleet about location, activity and performance.

The deal with Actifio is expected to have a five-year payback and is described as a way to keep options open for Waste Industries as they try to stay ahead of the curve on technological changes. According to the case study, "Not only does this reduce resource consumption both at home and in the cloud, it frees up time that data technicians would otherwise spend manually provisioning resources and network pathways every time Waste Industries launches a new application."

Data demand from IoT devices is projected to increase rapidly in the coming years and more companies in the waste industry are beginning to tout their abilities to keep up. Waste Management's vice president of collection and fleet operations recently said that the company had "just scratched the surface" of data capture and Rubicon Global has made its technological capabilities a main selling point. As companies look for ways to get more information about their operations, or potentially even run driverless trucks some day, this type of data infrastructure investment will be a big part of that.