With all of the advances in digital marketing and social media technology, it is crucial that companies use the right tools to gather information and the right people to intelligently decipher the data.

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The chart on the right takes data from the US Energy Information Agency and plots total US inventories of crude plus all other categories of liquid hydrocarbons, and shows the change between the week ending on the x-axis date, and the inventories for the like week of 2010.

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The software automates data discovery to uncover the right information to help make better business decisions.

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And given that the new owner is Google, a company with an enormous stock of private data in its own right, the potential for information invasion is even greater.

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This raises serious ethical questions about data ownership and our right to access our own health information.

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U.S. officials will still have to deal with what intelligence experts call "noise" -- the vast amount of reporting and other data that make it impossible to sort out the right information until the event actually occurs and the patterns are known.

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However, the challenge is to quickly identify what should be retained and to make good use of the information that is generated so that, with the right business processes in place, SMEs can derive valuable information from big data to gain unique insights into their organisation and their customers, improve efficiencies and ultimately add value to the bottom line.

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MI5, for instance, has not even bothered to register under the Data Protection Act, which gives people the right to see information about themselves held on computers.

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The key is to optimize the way data is used by asking the right questions, choosing the right information sources, and utilizing the right analysis tools and processes.

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"Saving that data and information is absolutely crucial so we can see what was wrong, what was right and what could have been done better, " says Sunder.

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