The amount of information created and replicated will surpass 1.9 zettabytes (trillion gigabytes) in 2011, and IDC expects "Big Data" to drive the next wave of investments in business analytics for CIOs in the Asia Pacific.

The popularity of social media and rich media files has soared in recent years and this has challenged organisations to keep pace with the increased velocity at which data is being generated.

"These new aspects of 'Big Data' are creating unprecedented levels of complexity for IT executives, particularly as they realise that these massive data sets cannot be processed, managed and analysed using traditional databases and architectures," said Philip Carter, associate vice president at IDC Asia Pacific.

"What is becoming clearer is that the real value from 'Big Data' will be derived from the high-end analytics, predominantly using data mining, statistics, optimisation and forecasting type of capabilities to proactively turn this data into intelligence to drive business benefits and better decision making capabilities."