The Digital Government plan doesn’t even mention the word “storage,” even though open data accessible to everyone is one of the linchpins of the plan.

But a recent survey by MeriTalk of 151 federal government IT professionals about big data found that storage was already an issue.

Factors found in the survey indicate the following:

• 87% of IT professionals say their stored data has grown in the last two years (by an average of 61%)
• 96% expect their data to grow in the next two years (by an average of 64%)
• 31% of data is unstructured, and that amount is increasing
• Agencies estimate they have just 49% of the data storage/access they need to leverage big data and drive mission results
• 40% of respondents pointed to storage capacity as one of the most significant challenges their agency faced when it came to managing large amounts of data
• Agencies currently store an average of 1.61 petabytes of data, but expect to get to 2.63 petabytes in just the next two years
• 57% of agencies say they have at least one dataset that’s grown too big to work with using their current data management tools and/or infrastructure
• While 64% of IT professionals say their agency’s data management system can be easily expanded/upgraded on demand, they estimate10 months as the average time they could double their short-to medium-term capacity
• The #1 step that agencies say they are taking to improve their ability to manage and make decisions with big data is to invest in IT infrastructure to optimize data storage (39%)