As market awareness and adoption increases, so customer confidence and clarity is growing and companies are better able to evaluate the benefits and challenges that big data presents their individual organisations.

It’s not surprising to see that big data is the top IT spending priority in Gartner’s recent global forecast.  These figures correlate with Cisco’s recent CloudWatch survey, which found that Big Data will be an important aspect of IT strategy and is set to increase in importance over the next 12 months.

Big data priorities

Two priorities emerge ahead of others – accessing data in real time and accessing data from multiple devices. It is no exaggeration to say that organisations of all shapes and sizes are experiencing a data explosion and that the IT department is in the eye of this data storm. Real time access to data is not only seen as a critical success …