73 percent of companies have or plan to invest in storage as a result of Big Data

The survey also revealed that sector-wise, financial services is taking the lead with 44% purchasing new technology to handle Big Data in the last year, closely followed by manufacturing at 40% and retail, distribution and transport accounting for just over a quarter at 28%.

Bartek Mytnik, EMEA sales manager at Qsan commented, “This poll closely follows what we are finding out in the field. The cash-rich financial services sector has both the funds to invest in new IT and the argument to support it as it handles billions of customer and transaction details every day, so it’s not surprising that this sector is leading the way in investment.

He continued, “However if we were to believe some of the hyped predictions of 2012, we might have expected a higher overall investment in storage provisioning. Indeed only 35% of respondents had actually implemented changes to accommodate Big Data which is a little over a third. We believe that the reason for this is two-fold. Firstly, new investments have only been introduced where there is a strong business case or at first where there is a real need for big data storage such as media and entertainment, academia and financial services industries where vast amounts of data are required to be archived. Secondly, we have seen that IT managers have been asked to tighten their belts along with other departments so funding for new storage systems has been slower to filter through to actual orders than anticipated.”

The survey results also suggest that company size only has a marginal impact on storage provisioning for Big Data since 70% of companies with 1,000 to 3,000 employees have or are planning some kind of investment in technology, while for companies sized 3000 plus employees, the figure is 76%.

Mytnik concluded, “This company size result matches our experience. The larger organisations tend to have greater IT budgets but medium-sized enterprises are also experiencing exponential growth in data volumes due to the popularity of BYOD and data rich technologies so there is only a marginal difference in behaviour between the various company sizes. The good news is that the survey follows our forecasts and suggests that around a third of companies are committed to investing in storage in the near future so successful storage vendors like Qsan can expect further growth in the UK and EMEA region for 2014.”