As the world’s information grows at breakneck pace, business are more desperate than ever to parse the overwhelming volumes of data that they now have access to. The enterprise industry surrounding “big data” has grown significantly, but analysts are now predicting that this year’s increased spending is only the beginning.

Market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) today predicted that the big data enterprise services industry will grow to take in $32.4 billion by the year 2017.

“The big data technology and services market represents a fast-growing multibillion-dollar worldwide opportunity,” said Dan Vesset, VP for Business Analytics and Big Data at IDC. “The big data market is expanding rapidly as large IT companies and start-ups vie for customers and market share.”

According to the firm’s other projections, the big data segment is set to grow at six times the rate of the combined IT and communication industries.

IDC also predicts that the growth of big data will be tightly tied to the growth of cloud computing and storage. The firm forecasts that cloud computing infrastructure will grow at a 49% compound annual growth rate through 2017 and that “significant” amounts of big data will be archived using cloud storage.

The firm’s report also predicts the rise of automated decision support (ADS) systems. As such systems inevitably begin to improve rapidly on the back of big data, knowledge workers could soon find themselves displaced by automated solutions.