If you think the amount of data your organization has to deal with is overwhelming now, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The oncoming “Big Data” flood could swamp many businesses if they don’t start working fast to put new technologies and data center capacity in place.

“(M)any businesses seem to have been caught off guard by the boom in ‘Big Data,’ “ warns Oracle, which has just released a 10-country study of company data center preparedness for next-generation needs. The study could also suggest that the recent takeoff of cloud computing services might have at least something to do with a fast-growing rush of data that in-house corporate data centers weren’t built to handle.

On a 0-to-10 scale, where 10 would be the most sophisticated data center strategy possible, companies surveyed (949 managers from 10 regions or countries across Europe, Russia and the Middle East) achieved an average score of 5.58. While not especially impressive, that does represent an improvement over the 5.22 average Oracle measured in the first phase of its “Next Generation Data Center Index,” released in May 2011.

So what’s the big deal about Big Data? The growing ability to monitor and measure, well, almost everything, means businesses that want to stay ahead of the competition will have to monitor and measure almost everything. And that means oceans and oceans of data that will need to be stored, sifted, sorted and analyzed for previously unimaginable nuggets of business intelligence gold.

“Wrestling with Big Data is going to be the single biggest IT challenge businesses face over the next two years,” says Luigi Freguia, senior vice president of systems at Oracle EMEA. “By the end of that period they will either have got it right or they will be very seriously adrift of their own business and the threats and opportunities posed by Big Data.”

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