Fusion PPT, a recognized strategy and technology solution firm, announced today that its report on the big data management challenge was featured in Information Week reports.

The volume of information coming into most companies has exploded in recent years, and many IT shops are dealing with extremely large data sets. If you don’t have the right tools and architectures to deal with all that information, big data can be a big problem, according to the InformationWeek 2012 Big Data Survey of 231 business technology professionals.

Unique characteristics of some industries, such as finance, genomics and health science research, are driving an increased volume of data. But our survey found that the top five big data drivers are financial transactions, email, imaging data, Web logs, and Internet text and documents–all data sources common to every industry. It’s clear that if big data isn’t a challenge for you now, it will be very soon.

The big data challenge is real, but only a third of the businesses we surveyed differentiate “big data” from traditional data, and use distinct tools and management approaches to deal with the higher volume, complexity and dynamics of big data processing. And nearly 90% of respondents are still using conventional databases as the primary means of handling data.

In this report, we take a look at what constitutes big data. Turns out it’s more than just size. You also have to look at the type of data involved–structured, unstructured or semi structured–as well as latency and complexity. Big data sets have their own unique challenges. They’re more difficult to search, store, share and analyze.