THOUSANDS of leaked US intelligence documents released by whistle-blower Web site WikiLeaks might not have happened with better data protection.

This is according to Deloitte senior consultant Avinth Rabbipal, speaking during the ITWeb Data Warehousing 2010 event.

Rabbipal noted that information management strategy has become a crucial component for both business and governments.

"Business faces more change than ever before due to the economic climate and governance regulations. There is increasing reliance on information to understand change and implement faster decision-making.

"In addition, cost pressures are driving adoption of lower cost solutions, such as software as a service (SaaS), open source and cloud-based data warehousing solutions."

According to Rabbipal, more than half of organisations will replace their primary data warehouse between now and 2015. However, he said this is going to disrupt business, as organisations build new data warehouse architecture.

"The essential requirements of a next-generation data warehouse platform will see real-time data warehousing, cloud computing, SaaS, open source software, in-memory processing and 64-bit computing."

Data management features very strongly as a key component to next-generation data warehouses, said Rabbipal. "Master data management is one of the highest priorities for data warehousing, as data quality remains a key focus."