Deploying big data: 2012 strategies for IT departments

1. Summary

Cloud computing and big data are in the enterprise to stay. IT decision makers have embraced, or at least accepted, the technologies, and companies now have the money to invest in them.

However, as a recently conducted GigaOM Pro survey tells us, successfully mining data and using the cloud to leverage its benefits comes with a handful of challenges: Data often isn’t collected frequently enough to provide meaningful analysis; companies lack individuals with adequate skill sets; legacy tools are hard to integrate with new methods; and security remains the No. 1 fear when it comes to moving to the cloud.

IT decision makers realize the future belongs to those companies who can overcome these and other hurdles and who can figure out how to harness big data to their advantage. The key is knowing how to accomplish this. The following pages will examine the survey’s results in depth and provide recommendations for making the most of your company’s big data.

This survey was conducted in Feb. 2012 and is composed of 304 IT decision makers at enterprises across North America. Respondents break down into small (500-999), medium (1,000-1,499), and large (1,500+) companies by number of employees.

Highlights from the survey include:

• Seventy-four percent of large companies said business intelligence (BI) projects were still the domain of the IT group.
• Just under half of companies (45 percent) said the main reason BI projects fail is due to a lack of expert staff who are able to draw conclusions and apply findings from data.
• Sixty-one percent of companies are investigating using a third-party service provider for their big data needs.
• Seventy percent of companies considering a service provider for their big data needs would choose a cloud service provider (i.e., Amazon, Rackspace, Logicworks) over an IT vendor (i.e., Microsoft, IBM).