New resource not so much a challenge as an opportunity for firms

Over the past three years, many businesses have shifted from thinking of big data as a challenge to perceiving it as the opportunity it is.

In order to better understand enterprise big data trends, Microsoft Corp conducted a study among 280 top decision-makers last year. The findings were interesting in the sense that more than 38 percent of respondents' current data stores contained unstructured data (valuable, but unorganized information).

Nearly 53 percent of the respondents rated increased amounts of unstructured data to analyze as extremely important. This trend is only increasing as more businesses realize that unstructured data holds the key to new value not accessible in their existing structures.