Why Your Drone Data Is Sitting in a Folder Unused

The gap between collecting data and actually using it

Here's an uncomfortable truth about the drone industry: we're very good at flying and not nearly as good at turning what we collect into something useful.

Talk to almost any organization running drone operations - mining companies, construction firms, municipalities, utilities - and you'll find the same pattern. Terabytes of aerial imagery sitting on hard drives. Point clouds from last year's surveys that nobody has opened since delivery. Thermal inspection data that was collected, invoiced, and promptly forgotten.

The flight happened. The data exists. But it's not doing anything.

The Scale of the Problem

The global drone analytics market reached USD 5.2 billion in 2024, with Canada accounting for roughly $1.7 billion in drone analytics revenue. The market is growing at over 20% annually, which sounds impressive until you realize what it implies: organizations are spending billions on analytics because they've already spent billions on data collection and have no idea what to do with what they've got.

A single 14-hour drone mission generating LiDAR data can produce 70 terabytes. High-resolution photogrammetry from a large site easily generates hundreds of gigabytes per flight. Most commercial drone operators are collecting thousands of images per week. The data accumulates faster than organizations can process it, let alone analyze it.

The result is what researchers call the "data-to-insight gap," the ever-widening space between collection capabilities and utilization capabilities. We've democratized data collection. We haven't democratized data interpretation.

Where Data Goes to Die

Watch what actually happens after a drone operation ends.

The pilot downloads imagery from the drone. It gets copied to an external drive, maybe uploaded to cloud storage. Someone processes it into an orthomosaic or point cloud - maybe. The processed deliverable gets sent to the client or filed internally. The raw data gets archived "just in case." And then... nothing.

Six months later, nobody can find the data. A year later, nobody remembers what parameters were used to collect it. Two years later, the hard drive it was stored on has failed or been reformatted.

This isn't a technology problem. The processing software exists. The storage exists. The problem is that most organizations treat drone data as a one-time deliverable rather than a persistent asset.

The Real Barriers

Processing Bottlenecks

Processing drone data requires serious computing power. A standard office laptop chokes on photogrammetry datasets that a gaming PC handles easily. Professional LiDAR processing needs 64GB+ of RAM, NVMe storage, and dedicated GPUs. Organizations that invested in drone hardware often didn't budget for the processing infrastructure to actually use it.

Skills Gap

Flying a drone requires one skillset. Interpreting drone data requires another entirely. A pilot can capture beautiful imagery without having any idea how to turn it into a point cloud, what accuracy it represents, or how to integrate it with existing GIS systems. Most organizations have pilots but lack data analysts who understand geospatial workflows.

Integration Failures

Drone data doesn't exist in isolation, or shouldn't. An orthomosaic is most valuable when it's layered with property boundaries, utility locations, and historical imagery in a GIS. A thermal inspection matters when it's linked to asset management systems and maintenance workflows. But integration requires planning, standards, and often custom development. Most organizations never get there.

Unclear Use Cases

The most common barrier is the simplest: organizations collected data without knowing what they wanted to do with it. "We should probably be using drones" leads to flying without clear objectives. The data gets collected because drones exist, and data collection seems valuable. But without a specific question to answer, the data has nowhere to go.

The Hidden Costs

Unused data isn't free. It's actually expensive in ways organizations rarely calculate.

Storage costs compound over time. A few terabytes doesn't seem like much until it's been sitting in cloud storage for three years, accruing monthly charges. Local storage eventually needs replacement, migration, backup systems.

Opportunity costs are harder to measure but real. That site survey from last year could answer a question someone's asking today - but nobody knows it exists or can find it. Information that could inform a decision sits inaccessible while someone commissions new data collection that duplicates what's already been captured.

Then there's the erosion of organizational support. When drone programs can't demonstrate value - when the answer to "what did we learn from all that flying?" is unclear - budgets get questioned. Programs that could be valuable get scaled back because nobody could articulate what the data was for.

What Actually Works

Start with the Question

Before any drone leaves the ground, someone should be able to answer: what decision will this data inform? If there's no clear answer, reconsider whether the flight should happen. Data collection without purpose creates archives, not insights.

Define the Deliverable

"Drone survey" isn't a deliverable. "2cm GSD orthomosaic with 5cm horizontal accuracy, delivered as GeoTIFF in NAD83 UTM Zone 10, integrated with existing property layer" is a deliverable. Specificity forces clarity about what's actually needed and how it will be used.

Build Processing into the Workflow

Don't treat processing as something that happens "later." Budget for it. Schedule it. Assign responsibility for it. If data isn't processed within two weeks of collection, it probably never will be.

Create Accessible Archives

Data that can't be found is data that doesn't exist. Implement naming conventions, metadata standards, and searchable catalogues. The person who needs the data in two years won't be the person who collected it. They need to be able to find it without institutional memory.

Connect to Decision Systems

The most valuable drone data feeds directly into systems people already use: GIS platforms, asset management databases, and project management tools. If someone has to open separate software to access drone insights, they probably won't.

The Operator's Role

This is where the industry needs to mature. Flying drones and delivering files isn't a complete service; it's only the beginning of one.

Professional operators should be asking clients not just "what do you want us to fly?" but "what problem are you trying to solve?" The answer shapes everything: collection parameters, processing approach, deliverable format, and integration requirements.

Sometimes the answer is "we actually need this data integrated with your existing survey control network, delivered through your GIS, with a change detection analysis comparing it to last year's flight." That's a different job than "fly over the site and give us an orthomosaic."

Sometimes the honest answer is "drones aren't the right tool for this." Clients respect operators who tell them that. It builds trust for the times when drones genuinely are the answer.

Moving Forward

Canada's drone industry is projected to exceed $9 billion by 2030. Most of that value will come not from flying but from what happens after flying, the analytics, the integration, the decisions informed by aerial data.

Organizations that figure this out will get genuine value from their drone investments. Those that don't will keep accumulating hard drives full of expensive photographs nobody looks at.

The technology for collection has democratized. The next frontier is democratizing interpretation, making it as easy to answer questions with drone data as it is to collect that data in the first place.

Until then, we're all sitting on gold mines we haven't figured out how to excavate.

About Aeria Solutions

Aeria Solutions Ltd. is a Canadian remote sensing company specializing in drone operations, marine mammal monitoring, and multi-platform data collection across Western Canada. We focus on turning aerial data into actionable insights, not just flying and delivering files. From Arctic deployments to offshore marine work, we bring professional methodology to complex environments.