Big data equals big business opportunities: survey

It showed that nearly 70 per cent of organisations are now considering, planning or running big data projects – with 44 per cent now considering, 22 per cent planning, 13 per cent testing or 20 per cent running big data projects.

The survey report, Balancing Opportunity and Risk in Big Data, was drawn from poll of almost 600 IT and business professionals worldwide and assessed the state of big data projects and understanding of big data strategies.

In the survey, most respondents cited the management of growing transaction volumes (74 per cent) as the most relevant aspect of big data to their organisation. The company claimed that this statistic indicated significant challenges in the more traditional enterprise data realm.

However, other respondents picked newer technologies as well, with 46 per cent selecting technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL for efficiently processing big data.

It also found that the management of big interaction data, including social media data (35 per cent), mobile device data (31 per cent) and machine-generated data (22 per cent), is rising in relevance.

“The reality is, big data represents both opportunities and challenges,” Informatica chief products officer, Girish Pancha, said.

According to the study, the lack of maturity in big data tools was the top challenge (52 per cent) that respondents face in big data projects, including a lack of support for reuse and metadata in current Hadoop environments.

The absence of support for real-time streaming data was another key challenge (39 per cent), followed by concerns over poor data quality (38 per cent), data security and privacy (38 per cent) and the limited availability of skilled developers to manage big data (35 per cent).

Other top concerns are overly difficult development for Hadoop (34 per cent), and lack of data governance capabilities (32 per cent).

So, what do organisations intend to get from their big data efforts?

Informatica said that 71 per cent of the respondents intend to improving efficiency in business operations by doing more things with more data. This is followed by increasing business agility (51 per cent).