By Charles F Moreira
Ovum analyst Tony Baer believes that big Data has passed the early-adopter phase among large Internet and media companies, and in 2013 it will enter the early-adopter phase for mainstream enterprises.
Interest in pilot or proof-of-concept (PoC) projects will accelerate, especially in the second half of the year. Vendor ecosystem formation is already well under way, with most established vendors having already established connectivity with Hadoop, the leading NoSQL (or postSQL) Big Data platform, and many will begin to release functionality that can execute natively inside Hadoop.
Activity will not be confined to Hadoop, and other NoSQL platforms such as MongoDB and Cassandra will gain more mainstream vendor support, while a new generation of Advanced SQL platforms is reinventing relational technology for analytics and Internet-scale transaction processing.
Ovum believes 2013 will be a year of evolution for Big Data. New ideas, products, technologies, and practices will emerge, but nothing will be set in stone.
Hadoop will become better defined, but the issue of what comprises core Hadoop and the implementation of new features promised with the 2.0 version will not be settled. Similarly, tooling momentum for making Big Data manageable and consumable will pick up, but the market will hardly become mature.
In 2013, enterprises will begin to grapple with data governance and stewardship issues, but determining what to govern and how to govern it, and how to rationalise the handling of Big Data with existing data warehousing practices, will not be settled.
In essence:-
Big Data will become a first class citizen with the IT organisation and the data centre.
Analytics applications and tools will make Big Data more consumable to the business.
Platforms are still maturing.
Data governance and data stewardship issues are starting to emerge.
Growing attention will be directed at Fast Data, the velocity side of Big Data.
Digital Universe
Meanwhile, a recent EMC-sponsored Digital Universe study,“Big Data, Bigger Digital Shadows, and Biggest Growth in the Far East,” conducted by IDC found a big data gap, where less than one per cent of the world’s Data is analysed and less than 20% is protected, though the amount of useful data is expanding.
This provides abundant opportunities for companies capable of protecting and extracting value from an expanding universe of data. Also, by 2020, emerging markets will supplant developed countries to produce most of the world’s data.
The Digital Universe study measures and characterises all the digital data created, replicated, and consumed worldwide in a single year. The 2012 report projects the growth of the Digital Universe through 2020.
IDC projects that the digital universe will reach 40 zettabytes (ZB) by 2020, or 5 ZB more than previous forecasts, resulting in a 50-fold growth from the beginning of 2010.
To appreciate the enormity of that, there are 700,500,000,000,000,000,000 grains of sand on all the beaches on earth (or seven quintillion five quadrillion) and 40 ZB is equal to 57 times that number or 5,247 GB per person worldwide.
The 2012 study is IDC’s first to be able to capture where the information in the digital universe either originated or was first captured or consumed, revealing some dramatic shifts currently under way.
The amount of data that requires protection is growing faster than the digital universe itself, yet levels of protection are not keeping pace. According to the study, 2.8 ZB of data will have been created and replicated in 2012, while machine-generated data is a key driver in the growth of the world’s data – which is projected to increase 15x by 2020.
The investment in spending on IT hardware, software, services, telecommunications and staff that could be considered the “infrastructure” of the digital universe will grow by 40% between 2012 and 2020. Investment in targeted areas like storage management, security, Big Data, and cloud computing will grow considerably faster.
The proliferation of devices such as PCs and smartphones worldwide, increased Internet access within emerging markets and the boost in data from machines such as surveillance cameras or smart meters has contributed to the doubling of the digital universe within the past two years alone — to 2.8 ZB.
However, large quantities of useful data are getting lost: The promise of big data lies within the extraction of value from large, untapped pools of data but the majority of new data is largely untagged file-based and unstructured data, which means little is known about it.
In 2012, 23% (643 exabytes) of the digital universe would be useful for big data if tagged and analysed but so far, only 3% of the potentially useful data is tagged, and even less is analysed. However, the amount of useful data is expanding with the growth of the digital universe and by 2020, 33% of the digital universe (over 13,000 exabytes) will have big data value if it is tagged and analysed.
Much of the digital universe is unprotected: The amount of data that requires protection is growing faster than the digital universe itself. Less than a third of the digital universe required data protection in 2010, but that proportion is expected to exceed 40% by 2020.
In 2012, while about 35% of the information in the digital universe required some type of data protection, less than 20% of the digital universe actually had these protections. The level of protection varies by region, with much less protection in the emerging markets.
Challenges such as advanced threats, the security skills gap and lack of adherence to security best practices among consumers and corporations will continue to compound the issue.
While emerging markets accounted for 23% of the digital universe as recently as 2010, their share is already up to 36% in 2012. By 2020, IDC predicts that 62% of the digital universe will be attributable to emerging markets. The current global breakdown of the digital universe is: U.S. – 32%, Western Europe – 19%, China – 13%, India – 4%, rest of the world – 32%. By 2020, China alone is expected to generate 22% of the world’s data.
Other key findings:
As cloud computing plays an even more important role in the management of big data, the number of servers worldwide is expected to grow tenfold and the amount of information managed directly by enterprise data centres will grow by a factor of 14.
The type of data stored in the cloud will also experience a radical transformation over the next few years. By 2020, IDC predicts that 46.7% of data stored in the cloud will be related to entertainment rather than enterprise data.
Surveillance data, embedded and medical data, and information created by computers, phones and consumer electronics will make up the remainder., while the amount of information stored in the digital universe about individual users exceeds the amount of data that they themselves create.
Western Europe is currently investing the most to manage the digital universe, spending US$2.49 per GB. The U.S. comes in second, investing US$1.77 per GB, followed by China at US$1.31 per GB and India at US$0.87 per GB.
As the infrastructure of the digital universe becomes ever more connected, information won’t reside within the region where it is consumed, nor will it need to. By 2020, IDC estimates that nearly 40% of data will be “touched” by cloud computing (private and public), meaning that somewhere between a byte’s origination and consumption, it will be stored or processed in a cloud.
“As the volume and complexity of data barraging businesses from all angles increases, IT organisations have a choice: they can either succumb to information-overload paralysis, or they can take steps to harness the tremendous potential teeming within all of those data streams,” said Jeremy Burton, EMC executive vice president, Product Operations and Marketing.
“This year’s study underscores the massive opportunity that exists for businesses that not only identify the potential benefits of the digital universe, but recognise the importance of navigating that universe with the right balance of technology, data security practices and IT skills,” he added.
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