Survey Sees Big Year Ahead for Big Data

Enterprises are recognizing big data as mission critical, increasingly need real time event processing, and are looking to move it all to the cloud, according to a new survey from GigaSpaces. Big Data is all the rage, and the survey of 243 IT professionals from various backgrounds and had three major findings:

• An overwhelming majority of organizations view their Big Data processing as mission-critical, as rated by 80% of respondents.
• For companies handling Big Data, the need for real-time functionality is both significant and growing – over 70% already need to process streaming Big Data, with half that number needing to handle both high volume and high velocity. The survey indicated that there is increasing readiness to use streaming solutions to deal with the challenges of Big Data and speed up Big Data processing.
• Most companies have plans to move their Big Data to the Cloud, or are considering the option. Only 20% of the IT professionals surveyed indicated that their company had no plans to move their Big Data to the cloud.

The last point contained an interesting wrinkle – the Big Data workloads headed for the cloud include mission-critical data and apps. “Eighty percent of those defining their Big Data apps as ‘Mission-Critical’ to the business are planning or considering a move to the cloud, while of those who consider their Big Data ‘Somewhat Important’ the number was 75% for the cloud move,” GigaSpaces reported.

The survey was conducted via an online survey service aimed at IT audiences, and distributed to IT and business professionals at several industry trade shows. Respondents hailed from a range of positions and in a variety of industries, such as Financial Services, Telecom, Retail, Insurance, Media, Government, E-Learning, Software Development, SaaS, and more.

Both the benchmark and the survey findings indicate a good road ahead for XAP, Gigaspace’s application platform geared for big data. XAP employs an in-memory data grid for pure processing speed, what it calls ‘share-nothing’ partitioning for reliability and consistency, and event-driven architecture that enables real-time processing of massive event streams and unlimited processing scalability.

GigaSpaces provides end to end scaling solutions for distributed, mission-critical application environments. Its solutions are designed to run on any cloud environment – private, public or hybrid. It has several customers in the Fortune Global 500, including in financial services, e-commerce and online gaming (gambling) providers and telcos.