Survey Finds Cloud, Big Data Confusion among IT Professionals

IT and security directors across a wide spectrum of industries don’t have a firm understanding of big data and cloud storage management and generally have not undertaken the necessary steps to allow their organizations to adapt to the operational and compliance issues they pose, according to a survey released today. Enterprise security and cloud platform developer LogLogic teamed with research consultant firm Echelon One to conduct the online survey of IT and security directors at a wide range of manufacturing, education, government, finance, healthcare, transportation, media and publishing organizations. The 207 responses, collected in January and February 2012, revealed a surprising divide between IT theory and real-world application among IT professionals.

While 49 percent of survey respondents indicated concern about managing big data (amounts of data so large they require specialized management tools), fully 38 percent of respondents admitted that they don’t really understand the concept. More revealing, 59 percent conceded that their organizations cannot adequately manage their existing data, relying on hastily adapted systems and programs like spreadsheets. 62 percent of those who responded indicated that they were responsible for over one terabyte of data. More than two-thirds ranked the management of IT data and IT logs as important or extremely important to their organizations. However, fully 15 percent of respondents said they did nothing to manage data logs. Budget restrictions were cited by most respondents who said they were unable to properly managing log data, but failure to understand the compliance and security implications was cited by roughly a quarter of survey respondents.

“Big data is about many terabytes of unstructured data. Information is power, and big data if managed properly can provide a ton of insight to help deal with security, operational, and compliance issues,” noted Mandeep Khera, chief marketing officer of LogLogic, in a release. “Organizations of every size are collecting more data from a variety of sources within the enterprise and the cloud infrastructures, and many organizations are not using the right tools and processes to manage these data. If this pattern continues, we will see enterprises falling farther behind, unable to derive actionable insights, which can help organizations make intelligent decisions.”

The respondents revealed an even greater disconnect regarding the cloud. 72 percent reported that their organizations possessed few or no tools to manage cloud data storage. Yet 59 percent indicated that they were considering cloud deployment in the future and 41 percent said that they had already added or would add some cloud capability this year. 70 percent of respondents indicated that they were very or somewhat concerned about managing log data for their cloud environments.

"The results show significant inconsistencies in practice. Namely, while big data, cloud needs and compliance requirements are clearly major concerns, the majority of companies are not prepared to deal with any of them adequately,” said Bob West, founder and CEO of Echelon One, said in a release. “It’s fascinating to see the rift, and the overwhelming percentage of companies surveyed are not prepared to manage big data properly, monitor cloud environments effectively, or report network and device activities properly. These companies are leaving themselves exposed to attacks, making less-than-informed business decisions and even risking fines from the federal regulatory agencies, for not complying with their requirements."