Survey finds lack of awareness of huge data or tips to manage it

More than a 3rd of security and IT operations professionals don't realize the theory of 'big data'.

A survey of 207 security and IT operations professionals by LogLogic found "significant" gaps between theory and practice, across industries, with reference to preparation for and management of massive data and cloud environments.

Just under half (49 per cent) said they were "somewhat" or "very" involved in managing big data, and 38 per cent said they don't have a transparent understanding of what big data is. Also, 59 per cent lacked the tools required to regulate data from their IT systems, resorting to using separate, disparate systems or even spreadsheets.

Although the survey didn't ask respondents to categorise the kinds of knowledge they manage, 62 per cent of the respondents manage over one terabyte of knowledge and over two-thirds (67 per cent) said that managing log and IT data was either "important" or "very important".

Mandeep Khera, chief marketing officer of LogLogic, said: “Big data is set many terabytes of unstructured data. Information is power and large data, if managed properly, can give a ton of insight to assist manage security, operational and compliance issues.

“Organisations of each size are collecting more data from quite a few sources inside the enterprise and the cloud infrastructures, and plenty of organisations aren't using the proper tools and processes to control this knowledge. If this pattern continues, we are able to see enterprises falling farther behind, unable to derive actionable insights which could help organisations make intelligent decisions.”