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Big data tops storage concerns

Study of UK market finds that big data is the key storage concern for almost three-quarters of organisations.

Article | June 13, 2012 - 9:26am

Big data is causing companies the biggest headache when they consider their storage infrastructure, according to a recent survey.

The research – commissioned by storage vendor Amplidata and carried out by the independent technology research company Vanson Bourne – found that 71 per cent of companies across all sectors rate big data as their biggest storage concern, ahead of ‘storage for large files such as rich media’, ‘always-on storage for cloud applications’, and ‘building disk archives, to replace tape’. This figure rose to 84 per cent in each of the retail, distribution and transport sectors, 76 per cent in financial services, and 72 per cent in manufacturing.

Furthermore, big data is a bigger problem for larger companies. More than three quarters (76 per cent) of companies with over 3,000 employees rank big data as their top concern, against 66 per cent for organisations with between 1,000 and 3,000.

While intuitive that with increasing numbers of employees comes more data being generated, the 1000 employee-mark seems to be a good mile stone that organisations begin citing data volumes as ‘big’.

Vanson Bourne says that its research suggests companies with over 1,000 employees are those that begin to experience big data concerns, where ‘big data’ is taken to refer to the complexity, velocity and variety of data, as well as the need to analyse historical and current data sets together, in addition to volume. However, there will be many tech start-up companies with far shorter payrolls that would vehemently contest this.

Mike Wall, chairman of the commissioning company Amplidata, says: “Managing large volumes of data, structured or unstructured, is not just a case of adding storage to your data centre. 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."

Vanson Bourne’s survey was compiled in April 2012 across 100 UK executives.The research for the UK market roughly mirrors the results of a similar study in the US.