Increasing data volumes crippling businesses

Computing giant Oracle has found that 93 per cent of the enterprises are losing revenue as a result of not being able to fully leverage the increase in information they collect.

The company surveyed 333 C-level executives from US and Canadian enterprises spanning 11 industries on how they were managing the deluge of data coming into their organisations and how well they are able to use this data to drive profit and growth. The findings suggest the majority of businesses do not know what to do with big data.

Startlingly, businesses reported that they are losing 14 per cent of their revenues or earning potential through ineffective data management processes.
The survey findings supports IBM’s statistic that the amount of data in the world is growing exponentially – so much so that 90 per cent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. Ion Oracle’s research, 94 per cent of the executives said their organisation is collecting and managing more business information today than two years ago, by an average of 86 per cent more.

The problem is what to do with all this extra data. Enterprises are awash with data of all types, with the world producing 2.5 quintillion bytes of it every day. Just shy of a third of executives (29 per cent) give their organisation a “D” or “F” in their ability to manage the data deluge. And unless businesses update their organisation of big data, 97 per cent predict they will not be able to handle the increase over the next two years.

Perhaps worryingly, the public sector, healthcare and utilities sectors were the worst prepared to handle a data deluge. However, the executives in the communications industry note they are most prepared, with 20 per cent giving themselves an "A” grade.

As the majority of the world’s industries, organisations and enterprises now rely on IT (particularly those data-intensive fields such as meteorology, genomics, pharmaceuticals and chemical, biological and environmental research) there is an increasing requirement for specifically developed IT solutions to manage and extract insight from the ever-growing data volumes, improve customer service, and, most importantly, capitalise on new business opportunities – 77 per cent of organisations surveyed said they were looking for more tailored options.

As some industries, such as oil and gas, are losing 22 per cent and 20 per cent in revenues respectively from their current data management processes, the pressure to reconsider data management is on.

Click here for a PDF visual breakdown of all of the statistics in this document plus more.