Big Data and Hadoop in the Cloud?

Over the last few weeks, there has been a boost in hype on Big Data and the Cloud.  But when asked about Big Data IN the cloud, end users are a little hazy.  I recently wrote a Research Brief on big data analytics in the cloud that illustrates among enterprise organizations (defined by number of employees > 1,000) 24% of respondents stated that they currently or plan to deploy business analytics in a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.  Drilling down into the details, more than 1/3 of these same enterprises have more than 100TB of total disk-based storage capacity.

What does this say? It could mean that organizations that already have significant volumes of data stored electronically in their data center understand the cost and effort required to manage large data sets.  The cloud offers substantial benefits of cost optimized infrastructure.  The ability to elastically deploy infrastructure based on changing needs on a project by project basis is appealing.  These enterprises may already be educated on the value of leveraging temporary assets as big data sets come in for temporary analysis projects.  Companies like 1010Data that offer cloud based analytics have confirmed this phenomenon.

At the recent EMC World conference, the theme of Cloud | Big Data was clear and focused.  At the event, it announced plans for a Hadoop distribution as an extension to the existing Greenplum product offering.  In today's press release EMC is coming through on its promise with an agreement to incorporate MapR Technologies' distribution for Hadoop adding high availability, snapshop features, performance enhancements, and ease of getting data into a Hadoop cluster (NFS direct access to HDFS)   While it will certainly give EMC customers an enterprise-class foundation to  manage Big Data challenges,  the details are not clear on what EMC plans to do with its existing alliance with Cloudera,

While the question still remains if customers will manage Big Data in the cloud, it is clear that the advancements in big data analytical platforms open potential for substantial market growth.