By a greater than two-to-one margin, organizations today view big data primarily as a business opportunity rather than an IT challenge and are moving quickly to do something about it, according to a recent survey of over 200 Indian IT and business professionals conducted by Informatica Corporation.
Designed to assess the state of big data projects and understand big data strategies, the survey reveals an aggressive move on the part of organizations to master big data for business advantage, with the majority of enterprises, nearly 70%, now considering (27%), planning (20%), testing (7%) or running (15%) big data projects.
When asked which aspects of big data are relevant to their organization, most Indian respondents cited the management of growing transaction volumes (58%), indicating there remained significant challenges even in the more traditional enterprise data realm. Meanwhile, the management of big interaction data including social media data (26%), mobile device data (21%) and machine-generated data (16%) is rising in relevance.
Improving efficiency in business operations by doing more things with more data is the number one business driver (55%). This is followed by attracting and retaining customers (38%). Also important is improving business agility (34%), enhancing analytics (36%), and lowering IT costs through technologies such as Hadoop (30%).
Lack of maturity in big data tools is the top challenge (42%) that respondents face in big data projects, including a lack of support for reuse and metadata in current Hadoop environments. Lack of support for real-time streaming data is another key challenge (32%), followed by concerns around data security and privacy (30%). In addition, respondents cited the difficulty and time involved in developing in emerging technologies such as Hadoop (27%), challenges faced due to poor data quality (21%), and the limited availability of skilled developers to manage big data (23%).
“The reality is, big data represents both opportunities and challenges, but those key challenges identified by our survey respondents are set to diminish with the advances introduced in the newest version of the Informatica Platform, Informatica 9.5,” said Girish Pancha, Chief Products Officer, Informatica. “Engineered expressly to help organizations maximize their return on big data, Informatica 9.5 will accelerate the ‘mainstreaming’ of new technologies such as Hadoop, enable existing skill sets to be leveraged for big data projects, and enable organizations to realize the promise of big data while maximizing the data’s value and reducing its costs.”