by Angela Guess
Nathan Eddy of eWeek reports that government agencies are still having a tough time making the most of Big Data. He writes, “Not a fan of big government? Well this will shock you: Government agencies will add a petabyte—that’s equal to one quadrillion bytes, or 1,024 terabytes—of stored data over the next two years, according to a MeriTalk survey of 151 federal government CIOs and IT managers. To put that in perspective, 1PB of data is equal to 20 million four-drawer filing cabinets filled with text. Meanwhile, government agencies are struggling to reap the benefits of big data as information piles up, lacking the data storage and access, computational power and personnel, the survey indicated.”
Eddy goes on, “The report, titled ‘The Big Data Gap,’ found that as agencies look to leverage big data, the technology and applications needed to successfully leverage big data are still emerging. Sixty percent of civilian agencies and 42 percent of Department of Defense/intelligence agencies say they are just now learning about big data and how it can work for their agency. Federal IT professionals say improving overall agency efficiency is the top advantage of big data (59 percent) followed by improving speed and accuracy of decisions (51 percent) and the ability to forecast (30 percent).”
