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And it's all true. Big data has the power to be hugely transformative. If we are able to harness the volume, velocity and variety of data, incremental revenue streams can be generated and new industries created.

To properly visualise the benefits of big data, it helps to look at real-life examples. One early example of data in action often highlighted is around a cholera outbreak in London during the summer of 1854. More than 600 people died, mostly within the first week.

It was a man called Dr John Snow who presented a map showing each of the first cholera-related deaths centred on a map. The results were immediately clear - nearly all of these deaths centred around one water pump. One of the earliest examples of big data in action saved lives, and helped Dr Snow find the water-borne cause of Cholera.

Now not all examples of big data today will be quite as impactful. But considering Dr Snow only marked down around 120 points on his map, it is worth considering what kind of information we can glean from today's datasets numbering into the thousands.

Data can be a tremendous source of insight when used properly. Firms that have big data and business intelligence as core processes are already receiving benefits affecting the bottom line.

But that huge amount of data becomes useless if we can't make proper use out of it. Data is only of value when it becomes information that helps us and provides answers. Otherwise there's little point in having it.

LACK OF DATA SKILLS
Most companies aren't in the position to make the best use out of big data. The key challenge is that the cost of manipulation and analysis on the volume of big data you have can be prohibitive for many companies. According to Pure Storage's report, 'Big Data's Big Failure: The struggles businesses face in accessing the information they need', released in December, there were a number of reasons why companies struggled to handle the vast amounts of data available.

More than half of European businesses said that they didn't have people with the right skills to handle big data properly - the data scientists and experts with the right statistical and analytical skills who could understand what the data actually meant. The lack of skilled workers to analyse big data is a major problem. To get the right insights from data, analytics experts have the ability to mine data for correlations, allowing them to feedback on how to create better products, make processes more efficient, and even find new sources of revenue.

The demand is rising - according to online jobs platform Adzuna, the number of data scientist jobs grew by 22 per cent in 2015, and now pay an average salary of more than £55,000. But these experts aren't easy to find. It's not good enough to just have a grasp of analytics - they need to have a firm grasp of digital and how numbers apply to business strategy.

THE COST OF MISSING OUT
This inability to make the best use of data could be costing companies millions of pounds every year. More than 78 per cent of European businesses said they would be able to boost their performance by at least 21 per cent if they could access insights faster. And over half said they'd lost an opportunity they hadn't seen until it was already gone.

Access to real-time data is a far off dream for most firms. Over half of European businesses said that had they had lost an opportunity which they hadn't seen until had already gone. Nearly a third had it happen more than once a year, while almost a fifth saw it happen a few times a week.

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