According to a survey completed by Wall Street & Technology, nearly two-thirds of financial services firms feared that their analytics programs and infrastructures could not handle the volume and analytical complexity of today’s financial data. That fear is spreading to other sectors as more and more companies report that neither their technology nor their employees are able to sift through the amount of financial data that is bombarding their companies.

John Van Decker of Gartner (News - Alert), a technology research company, stated that companies are starting to invest more money in technology that helps them to make sense of mountains of financial data.

“I think organizations don't necessarily have a lack of data, but they do have a lack of capability on how to consistently consolidate,” Van Decker noted. “There is definitely an interest in leveraging technology more in the office of finance and as a result we are seeing many more applications coming to market that are attempting to meet some of these needs.”

The Institute of Chartered Accounts of Scotland and the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants both indicated that annual reports from businesses have grown approximately 44 percent in size over recent years.

“So much financial data is hindering, not helping, communication,” said the joint report. “Many key messages about a company’s performance are drowned by the detail.”

Research firm IDC (News - Alert) recently conducted a study that demonstrated that the market for Big Data would grow approximately 40 percent per year for the next several years. By 2015, Big Data will reach $16.9 billion, which is seven times the rate of growth that all information technology and communications enterprises will experience.

However, the collection of data presents challenges not only for interpretation of information but also for security. The Online Trust Alliance reported 588 instances of data breaches in 2011, which costs businesses over $6.5 billion dollars. The OTA recommends periodically re-evaluating what data is being collected and why. Also, the organization recommends purging data that isn’t useful. In addition, companies should take a good look at their data archiving strategy.  

“Validate why you have it and validate why you keep it,” says Craig Speizle, OTA’s executive director and president.

Google (News - Alert) CEO Eric Schmidt once said at a technology conference that we create as much data in two days now as we cumulatively created from the dawn of civilization to the year 2003. According to Mashable, 57.5 billion 32 GB iPads would be required to store the amount of data that is created within a year. Those iPads would cost $34.4 trillion, which is equal to the combined GDPs of the U.S., Japan, Italy, the U.K., China, France and Germany.

John Van Decker points out that companies can save a significant amount of money by beefing up their technology to process the horde of financial data that comes their way. Apparently, the days of handling financial data with Excel spreadsheets and old legacy systems have passed into history.