The agile business is the future of business. With technologies such as cloud computing, increasing globalization integration and flexible business practices, transforming the speed in which firms are adjusting to market demands.

Central to this agility is capitalizing on and making sense of the sea of data unleashed by the computer age. This unstructured data, known as Big Data and coming both from external sources and internal, gives businesses almost real-time visibility into developing trends and market adjustments.

Harnessing Big Data has been a trick, however, and for many firms the dream of using unstructured data for business intelligence is just that: a dream. The volume of data is so great, the systems for analyzing the data are still developing, and the business systems for effectively using the data are still being devised.

But companies are starting to get a handle on Big Data, and recently Forrester Research (News - Alert) released a study that looked at what successful businesses have done to actually unleash the potential of Big Data.

One key is a hub-and-spoke architecture for analyzing Bid Data.

“Yesterday’s correct data architecture involved centralized warehouses, marts, operational data stores, and a lot of [extract, transfer and load] ETL," Brian Hopkins, principal analyst for Forrester report, told Information Age recently. “Because data warehouses were expensive, building one and forcing all data into it was a logical approach.”

But with the maturing of data warehouse appliances, this need has disappeared.

A hub-and-spoke model “features rapid analytics and extreme-scale operations on raw data in an affordable distributed data hub," said Hopkins. "Firms that get this concept realize all data does not need first-class seating.”

The hub-and-spoke model enabled businesses to analyze and process more forms of data, and it saves money by removing the need for capital intensive data warehousing infrastructure, according to Hopkins. All 11 of the companies that the study analyzed were using some form of the hub-and-spokes model, a contrast to the layer-cake approach of the past that was characterized by having a single enterprise data warehouse and building a business intelligence system on top of it.

Data center hosting company Internap (News - Alert), “Breaking Down Big Data” this Wednesday, August 7. The webinar will help businesses get past the nonsense, understand what big data is all about and leverage the concepts to lower cost, increase agility and deliver more data and analytics.

All attendees will also receive a complimentary copy of the Forrester report on Big Data, “Deliver On Big Data Potential With A Hub-And-Spoke Architecture.” The report usually sells for $499.