We were humbled and proud to be named recently, along with some other great companies, to the inaugural CRN Magazine Big Data 100 list. Big Data is a big deal and it holds tremendous promise in helping organizations to better understand their customers, their businesses, and the world around them. It will get them to a deeper level of analysis and help them make better decisions based on that analysis. But with all of that potential comes a problem. The costs associated with storing and managing Big Data might outweigh the value gained by its use, especially given the storage explosion taking place in most organizations.
However, the scope of the storage explosion is not the result of Big Data. To be sure, the need and desire to capture and analyze all of the data about every interaction on the web, on mobile devices, and at brick and mortar locations will continue to drive a deluge of data, and that data will need to be stored. 
But the real culprit of the storage explosion is Copy Data, not the data about those transactions, but all of the copies of that data that are created by siloed backup, protection, and business continuity systems.
In their recent report on the Copy Data problem, IDC estimated that up to 60% of enterprise disk storage systems (DSS) capacity may have been made up of copy data. The Copy Data problem is also very costly, driving up to 85% of storage hardware purchases and 65% of storage infrastructure software purchases in 2013, according to IDC. All of this adds up to $44 Billion per year today and will grow to $48 Billion per year in 2016. *
Compare that to IDC’s estimate of the storage expenditures on Big Data of $6 Billion in 2016** and you begin to get a sense of the size of the copy data problem. Big Data is big, but Copy Data is BIG.
In fact, for all of those organizations daunted by the pending expense of putting the infrastructure in place to support Big Data, they can take heart. Solving their Copy Data issue can make a lot of room, in both freed storage capacity and reduced expenditure, to support their Big Data projects.
Actifio was purpose-built to solve the Copy Data problem while meeting the needs of the organization for better data protection and availability. Many organizations use Actifio to replace legacy data management systems that can’t keep pace with required SLA’s or required backup windows. It turns out, however, that in addition to solving the storage explosion in large organizations, using Actifio makes Big Data a smaller problem for them as well. Optimizing their storage and software budgets with the help of Copy Data Management frees up storage capacity to store Big Data, frees up dollars to fund Big Data initiatives, and sets up an optimized framework for managing Big Data going forward.
Check out the video below to hear the Actifio team give their thoughts on solving the Big Data problem.
*IDC The Copy Data Problem: An Order of Magnitude Analysis, doc #239875, March 2013.