Once upon a time, the data that most businesses had to work with was mostly structured and small in size. This meant that it was relatively easy for it to be analysed using simple business intelligence (BI) tools.

Today, this is no longer the case. Much of the data that organisations are mining is unstructured or semi structured, and the trend is growing such that more than 80 percent of corporate data is expected to be unstructured by 2020.

On top of this, the rate at which this data is being created is expected to increase at such an extent that IDC predicts the global datasphere will grow from 33 zettabytes (ZB) in 2018 to 175 ZB by 2025.