Caught off-guard by Big Data?

27 Jan 2012

Research from Oracle and Quocirca suggests that companies panic-buying capacity in order to meet short-term data-storage needs. Jessica Twentyman takes a look at the findings.

That’s the stark warning recently issued by Luigi Freguia, a senior vice president within the EMEA operations of systems and software giant Oracle. “Wrestling with Big Data is going to be the single biggest IT challenge companies face over the next two years,” he said. “By the end of that period, they will either have got it right, or they will be very seriously adrift of their own business and the threats and opportunities posed by data.”

That may sound rather ominous, but it’s fair to assume that a little marketing hyperbole is at play here. After all, since its $5.6 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems back in 2010, Oracle doesn’t just sell the applications and databases that companies use to capture and organise a significant portion of the big data they currently handle, but the hardware to process and store it, too.

But the wider context in which these comments were made is pretty interesting. Oracle has commissioned a rolling programme of research, the Next Generation Datacentre Index (or NGDI), which is conducted on the company’s behalf by independent analyst firm Quocirca and aims to throw light on data centre strategies across the EMEA region.

One of the main findings in the most recent ‘cycle’ of this research (Cycle 2, conducted in November 2011), is that, of the 949 managers in large organisations, 44 percent indicated that they used only in-house data centre facilities, down from 60 percent during Cycle 1 of the research, conducted in February 2011.

According to Oracle, this suggests that companies are increasingly opting to “externalise” data centre capabilities; in other words, they are using third-party cloud services to store data that they might otherwise host on-site, were capacity were not an issue. And, in the Cycle 1 research, 27 percent of respondents believed they would need more data centre capacity within the next two years. This time around, it was 38 percent.

But does it necessarily follow that big data has caught companies off-guard? There could be other drivers, such as cost concerns: in the competitive cloud storage market, providers compete fiercely on cost. As a result, it’s a buyers market for savvy IT directors and CIOs who need a place to stash corporate data cheaply and effectively – especially data that’s useful for analysis but not judged to be mission-critical and/or subject to compliance issues. In other words, shipping data out to a third-party site may be a smart move, rather than a strategy that they’re forced to embark on because of capacity constraints.

Either way, the research certainly suggests that better data centre planning is needed. In the most recent cycle, almost 39 percent of respondents admit to second-guessing future workload requirements in their data centre operations. The proportion that said their company uses historical data as the basis for advanced or predictive analytics, meanwhile, increased between Cycles 1 and 2, from 39 percent to 50 percent.

And just because a company’s data is outsourced or migrated to a cloud service, it may still need to be retrieved and brought back in-house for analysis at a later date, according to Clive Longbottom, an analyst at Quocirca and an IP EXPO Pathfinder.

“As the value of information grows, it is becoming increasingly likely that organisations will be forced to put a value on the balance sheet. Therefore, the capability to collate the data in a central, accessible, secure and reliable location becomes key,” he commented.

“Even where federation of data is being used, centralisation will need to be through a data centre – and the research here shows that the majority of organisations, while heading in the right direction, still have a long way to go in order to support their information needs.”