Big Data Top Storage Challenge for 71% of UK Organisations in 2012

Amplidata announced that an independent survey found an average of 71% of organisations surveyed in the UK named big data as their top data storage challenge in 2012.

Concerns were especially high in the retail, distribution & transport sectors, with 84% rating it as their top concern, and in financial services, with 76%.
 
Carried out by market research firm Vanson Bourne, the UK responses mirrored results in separately published US surveys showing that big data demands have grown even bigger, often dominating the IT agenda and the budget.

While the term big data formerly referred to massive sets of semi-structured data for analytics, big data can characterise any data set that consists of large volumes of data, lots of variety, or high velocity data transfer (or all three). Technology changes across a variety of sectors, such as the increasing use of high-resolution video in retail marketing campaigns, and in transportation with cameras mounted on vehicles, were key market drivers. So is the movement of organisations away from tape-based archives and towards live archived data that can serve as a valuable resource for present decisions, instead of inactive data that is merely locked away.
 
The larger the company the stronger the need to address big data, the survey indicates. Some 76% of respondents from businesses with over 3,000 employees ranked big data as their top concern, against 66% when the organisations staff counts between 1,000 and 3,000. While intuitive that that with increasing numbers of employee comes more data being generated, the 1,000 employee-mark seems to be a good mile stone that organisations begin citing data volumes as big.
 
Other pressing issues in order of priority
for UK organisations,
as identified by this survey, are:

1. Storage for large files such as rich media
2. Always-on storage for cloud applications
3. Building disk archives, to replace tape.

Mike Wall, chairman of Amplidata, says: "Managing large volumes of data, structured or unstructured, is not just a case of adding storage to your datacentre. It presents challenges that only appear when the amount of data reaches a certain size. Object storage was specifically designed to address such challenges and, as such, is being adopted as the only viable long-term solution for many big unstructured data projects."
 
Amplidatas AmpliStor system allows organisations to deploy large-storage infrastructures to benefit from high levels of reliability and availability at the low cost. Typically customers deploy these multiple tiers to provide assurance for data durability. With AmpliStor a single instance of data provides higher durability, significantly reducing both Capex and Opex.
 
Vanson Bourne’s survey was compiled in April 2012 based on a random survey of 100 IT decision-makers in the UK.