"The reality is, big data represents both opportunities and challenges," Informatica chief products officer, Girish Pancha, said.

According to the study, the lack of maturity in big data tools was the top challenge (52 per cent) that respondents face in big data projects, including a lack of support for reuse and metadata in current Hadoop environments.

The absence of support for real-time streaming data was another key challenge (39 per cent), followed by concerns over poor data quality (38 per cent), data security and privacy (38 per cent) and the limited availability of skilled developers to manage big data (35 per cent).

Other top concerns are overly difficult development for Hadoop (34 per cent), and lack of data governance capabilities (32 per cent).

So, what do organisations intend to get from their big data efforts?