The ability of legacy data warehousing platforms and BI tools to glean insights from big data is decreasing exponentially as more sources of data are poured into them, according to a new survey involving more than 250 senior executives. The survey, sponsored by Actian Corporation, found analytic workloads are failing in traditional technology environments that are pervasive across enterprise networks. Fifty percent of the IT leaders surveyed indicated they are not very confident in their existing data infrastructures, while 56 percent said legacy systems are feeling the strain of these new workloads today and 42 percent said their data warehousing platform is breaking under the pressure.
Data is growing exponentially across industries, with new data sources and the proliferation of connected things presenting new challenges for IT teams. Today, organizations must access, process and analyze their data in a manner that is completely different from how it was done even five years ago. They are increasingly turning to Hadoop and Spark for help. While these new data platforms are cost-effective places to dump massive amounts data, they are still too immature to provide the enterprise-grade, secure performance needed to successfully run advanced analytics jobs that will enable them to operate with real-time insights. The performance of business intelligence tools is also suffering in this environment. Just 40 percent of respondents said their BI tools are working well with historical data sets, while 32 percent acknowledged these tools are overmatched by increasing data volumes. 21 percent said performance on big data sets is so poor as to be no longer viable.
Organizations face a set of unique challenges—and opportunities—as they navigate the disruptive waters of the modern data era and start to implement broad-based big data analytics and Internet of Things strategies to drive new revenue, improve customer analytics and capitalize on business opportunities,” said Ashish Gupta, CMO and senior vice president of business development for Actian. “These same organizations know they are sitting on a wealth of untapped data due to the commercial and technical constraints of their traditional data management systems. They know they need a new approach.”
Forty seven percent of respondents said the cost to maintain traditional systems continues to rise. An additional 46 percent acknowledged that these traditional technologies were not architected to handle—and lack the flexibility required for—modern workloads. Confidence is low when it comes to scalability, but the gap between C-level executives—27 percent of whom were “completely confident” in their existing data infrastructure’s ability to scale—and IT staff (just 13 percent) was notable. 41 percent of respondents said the explosion of new types and sources of data are overwhelming systems and slowing performance. When asked how they plan to address issues with their organization’s traditional data platform, 32 percent indicated that they intend to rip and replace with a modern solution. However, a greater number are looking to augment it with tools that can maximize their investment (62 percent) and many plan to keep moving excess data into storage and deal with it later (45 percent). Nearly half said they currently look to SQL analytics to help them make sense of their big data.
Just like mainframes that could not keep up with compute and scale requirements, traditional data management systems are faltering in the face of current data workloads because of their architectural limitations and expensive commercial models,” said Gupta. “Similar to mainframes that still exist for specific tasks, customers will not rip and replace traditional systems for transaction processing workloads, choosing instead to augment these systems with powerful analytic platforms to garner timely insights and maximize the value of their data.”
The global survey, sponsored by Actian Corporation, was conducted in October 2015 and represents the views of more than 250 CEOs, CIOs/CTOs and IT leaders spanning more than 20 industries, including accounting/finance/banking, arts and entertainment, ecommerce, healthcare, information technology and retail.
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