It showed that nearly 70 per cent of organisations are now considering, planning or running big data projects -- with 44 per cent now considering, 22 per cent planning, 13 per cent testing or 20 per cent running big data projects.

The survey report, Balancing Opportunity and Risk in Big Data, was drawn from poll of almost 600 IT and business professionals worldwide and assessed the state of big data projects and understanding of big data strategies.

In the survey, most respondents cited the management of growing transaction volumes (74 per cent) as the most relevant aspect of big data to their organisation. The company claimed that this statistic indicated significant challenges in the more traditional enterprise data realm.

However, other respondents picked newer technologies as well, with 46 per cent selecting technologies such as Hadoop and NoSQL for efficiently processing big data.

It also found that the management of big interaction data, including social media data (35 per cent), mobile device data (31 per cent) and machine-generated data (22 per cent), is rising in relevance.