The potential of Big Data is no secret – we’ve all heard about it and we’d all like to tap into it and discover actionable insights. But what about those organizations that don’t actually have that much Big Data lying around to dig into? Not everyone has the capability to store up such vast quantities of information, or organize it – it’s damn expensive after all – but even so, it’d be nice to get the intelligence all the same.

Enter Enigma, a mysterious Big Data startup from New York that’s been attracting quite a bit of attention from investors lately. Big Data is an enigma at the best of times, and even more so if you don’t actually own any, but with Enigma that no longer matters.

Enigma offers a Big Data solution with a difference – rather than delving deep into its client’s own sets of data, it gets its insights from more than 100,000 publicly available data sources including government agencies, financial and real estate records. The company is still in beta, but it’s an idea that clearly has potential – so much so, that it’s recently secured $1.1 million in funding to get itself off the ground.

So what kind of insights does Enigma provide? Well, trend analysis is one. For example, if you’re an investor in real estate, you might want to check how different markets around the country are performing in relation to employments stats. Alternatively, you could use it to check on something even more enigmatic, such as how many frozen pizzas are sold in New York compared to other cities.

Enigma is just the latest example of what Alistair Croll talked about yesterday at Strata, when he explained that while the concept of using data has been around for years, it’s only recently that we’ve actually had the tools to use it. The 100,000+ data sources that Enigma draws upon have been lying around in the public domain for decades, but until now no one has had the manpower to be able to take advantage of them. By tapping into these public records, businesses can come up with all kinds of insights to help focus their strategies and guide their decision making – all that’s holding them back is their own creativity.

Enigma makes it possible because not only does it track the vast amount of public data out there, but it also structures it in such a way that users can search through it intelligently and put it to good use. Enigma’s relational database and other analytic tools allow users to refine and shape data sets in a variety of contexts, allowing them to rapidly prototype hypotheses as they sort through various data sets. Essentially, comparing disparate data becomes as easy as A, B, C.

The most obvious industries that would benefit from Enigma’s public data search and analysis solution include the finance, legal, consulting, education and media sectors, but in actual fact there are very few businesses that wouldn’t be able to gain some kind of advantage – all they need to do is figure out the enigma of what it is they’re looking for.