Big Data Equals Big Opportunity, Say Indian IT And Biz Pros

By a greater than two-to-one margin, organisations 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, the provider of data integration software.

Designed to assess the state of Big Data projects and understand Big Data strategies, the survey reveals an aggressive move on the part of organisations to master Big Data for business advantage, with the majority of enterprises, nearly 70 percent, now considering (27 percent), planning (20 percent), testing (7 percent) or running (15 percent) Big Data projects.

The Multiple Facets Of Big Data

The new survey reveals the diversity of Big Data and its breadth of opportunities and challenges. When asked which aspects of Big Data are relevant to their organisation, most Indian respondents cite the management of growing transaction volumes (58 percent), indicating there are still significant challenges even in the more traditional enterprise data realm. Meanwhile, the management of big interaction data – including social media data (26 percent), mobile device data (21 percent) and machine-generated data (16 percent) – is very much rising in relevance due to the insights, efficiencies and customer engagement these new data types can help drive.

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Many Eyes On Many Prizes

What do organisations intend to get from their Big Data efforts? A wide variety of benefits, according to survey respondents. Improving efficiency in business operations by doing more things with more data is the number one business driver (55 percent). This is followed by attracting and retaining customers (38 percent).

But also important is improving business agility (34 percent), enhancing analytics (36 percent), and lowering IT costs through technologies such as Hadoop (30 percent).

Big Data Challenges

Lack of maturity in Big Data tools is the top challenge (42 percent) 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 percent), followed by concerns around data security and privacy (30 percent). In addition, respondents cited the difficulty and time involved in developing in emerging technologies such as Hadoop (27 percent), challenges faced due to poor data quality (21 percent), and the limited availability of skilled developers to manage Big Data (23 percent).