Companies have never been in a better position to leverage the mountains of data available to them to allow them to quickly gain insights for real business results. Far from being a niche technology, big data is at work in almost every sector of the economy. Ian Jansen van Rensburg, senior systems engineering manager at VMware Sub-Saharan Africa, points out that as technology morphs, so does the nature of the data it produces, creating more intelligence within the data.

“You only need to look at the proliferation of smart devices and what you can do with your smartphone to understand how the world has moved on. However, with theincreased sophistication of these devices comes a major increase in the amount of data that is generated by them,” he says. “The increase in data is driven by user demands for greater and greater functionality on the devices. Users are also looking for faster and smarter access to their data.“Access to data has always been a partof IT, but with the developments in new smart devices, smart access to larger  amounts of data is necessary and because of this, the ability to draw intelligence from big data is critical.”