Today, Unravel revealed the results of a big data survey of more than 300 US IT decision makers. There are a lot of interesting findings in the data. Overall, the survey results show that big data is increasingly being deployed in the cloud and that Spark has gained rapid popularity. The data also reveals that enterprises are most concerned with a lack of sufficient technical talent to properly manage big data as well as the perceived high cost of deploying big data.
Overall, the survey data reveals that enterprises are overwhelmingly embracing the cloud, with big data being a major driver in that. According to the survey, 79 percent of the respondents have big data workloads currently running in the cloud, while 83 percent have a strategy to move existing big data applications into the cloud. As I wrote in Forbes recently, the cloud is an ideal place to deploy big data due to its elastic compute requirements. For example, e-commerce retailers and the spiking traffic they experience on a day like Cyber Monday. With its apps in the cloud, they have instant access to additional compute and storage resources to accommodate traffic surges and to scale back down during quieter times. In a traditional on-premises setting, they would have to provision extra servers and other infrastructure that would go unused most of the year.
The survey also revealed that most respondents are embracing both a multi-cloud strategy (56 percent) and a hybrid cloud strategy (56 percent). Hybrid cloud deployments allow enterprises to keep sensitive workloads on-premises, while multi-cloud approaches allow them to cost-optimize between the various platforms.
Other insights include:
As we see consistently, enterprises have embraced a wide range of technologies to help them harness the power of data and those investments are starting to pay off, accelerated in part by the availability and maturity of public cloud and hybrid cloud offerings. However, operational challenges remain and these are now being addressed though a more robust Data Operations approach to people, process and technology needs to support production workloads and applications.
The survey was conducted by Sapio Research on behalf of Unravel in January 2019 Respondents were IT decision makers from firms with more than 1,000 employees. 35 percent of respondents held C-level or VP positions, while the remaining 65 percent were directors or managers.