Big data has become a reality in the Middle East. But it is not the same reality for every company, or every user. The explosion of data is creating different problems and opportunities. The medical provider required to store scanned images for each patient’s lifetime faces a very different challenge to the FMCG brand now offered an unprecedented depth of customer purchasing behaviour data. The end user despairing over the time taken to locate a file or email has a different set of challenges to the legal team struggling with new, big data inspired compliance demands.
According to Gartner (News - Alert), a recent survey of 720 companies asked about their plans to invest in big data gathering and analysis revealed that almost two-thirds are funding projects or plan to this year, with media/communications and banking firms leading the way. The research firm insists 2013 is the year of experimentation and early deployment for big data. Adoption is still at the early stages with less than 8 percent of all respondents indicating their organization has deployed big data solutions. 20 percent are piloting and experimenting, 18 percent are developing a strategy, 19 percent are knowledge gathering, while the remainder has no plans or don’t know.
This is, therefore, a critical phase in the big data evolution. While storage costs have come down in recent years, organizations cannot possibly take a ‘store everything’ approach to big data and hope to realize the full long term benefit. The issue is not only what data to retain and where but how to extract value from that data – not just now but in the future as big data technologies, including analytics, become increasingly sophisticated.
In addition to the huge expansion in data volumes, organizations also now have access to new content types. While this depth of data offers exciting opportunities to gain commercial value, it also creates significant management challenges. How should the business protect, organize and access this diverse yet critical information that increasingly includes not only emails and documents but also rich media files and huge repositories...Read More