Along with tremendous opportunity, today’s rapid growth of data also presents agencies with a daunting challenge that is pushing the limits of existing Information Technology (IT) infrastructure. Agencies hoping to reap the proven value of big data through effective use of their IT investments must contend with a wide range of new and rapidly-shifting technologies. In fact, the majority of modern data – up to 80-percent, by some industry estimates – is now unstructured, file-based and resistant to traditional analytic processes.
To face what we call this “big data challenge,” agencies must have access to highly skilled data scientists, advanced tooling and the sophisticated domain expertise needed to unlock value from complex and massive floods of data. Further, agencies need to deploy these resources without the burdensome expense of building massive IT infrastructure from scratch and recruiting an entire team of analytics employees.