What exactly is Big Data? At first glance, the term seems rather vague, referring to something that is large and full of information. That description does indeed fit the bill, yet it provides no information on what Big Data really is.
Big Data is often described as extremely large data sets that have grown beyond the ability to manage and analyze them with traditional data processing tools. Searching the Web for clues reveals an almost universal definition, shared by the majority of those promoting the ideology of Big Data, that can be condensed into something like this: Big Data defines a situation in which data sets have grown to such enormous sizes that conventional information technologies can no longer effectively handle either the size of the data set or the scale and growth of the data set. In other words, the data set has grown so large that it is difficult to manage and even harder to garner value out of it. The primary difficulties are the acquisition, storage, searching, sharing, analytics, and visualization of data.
There is much more to be said about what Big Data actually is. The concept has evolved to include not only the size of the data set but also the processes involved in leveraging the data. Big Data has even become synonymous with other business concepts, such as business intelligence, analytics, and data mining.
Paradoxically, Big Data is not that new. Although massive data sets have been created in just the last two years, Big Data has its roots in the scientific and medical communities, where the complex analysis of massive amounts of data has been done for drug development, physics modeling, and other forms of research, all of which involve large data sets. Yet it is these very roots of the concept that have changed what Big Data has come to be.
As analytics and research were applied to large data sets, scientists came to the conclusion that more is better—in this case, more data, more analysis, and more results. Researchers started to incorporate related data sets, unstructured data, archival data, and real-time data into the process, which in turn gave birth to what we now call Big Data.
In the business world, Big Data is all about opportunity. According to IBM, every day we create 2.5 quintillion (2.5 3 1018) bytes of data, so much that 90 percent of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years. These data come from everywhere: sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos posted online, transaction records of online purchases, and cell phone GPS signals, to name just a few. That is the catalyst for Big Data, along with the more important fact that all of these data have intrinsic value that can be extrapolated using analytics, algorithms, and other techniques.
Big Data has already proved its importance and value in several areas. Organizations such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), several pharmaceutical companies, and numerous energy companies have amassed huge amounts of data and now leverage Big Data technologies on a daily basis to extract value from them.
NOAA uses Big Data approaches to aid in climate, ecosystem, weather, and commercial research, while NASA uses Big Data for aeronautical and other research. Pharmaceutical companies and energy companies have leveraged Big Data for more tangible results, such as drug testing and geophysical analysis. The New York Times has used Big Data tools for text analysis and Web mining, while the Walt Disney Company uses them to correlate and understand customer behavior in all of its stores, theme parks, and Web properties.
Big Data plays another role in today’s businesses: Large organi-zations increasingly face the need to maintain massive amounts of structured and unstructured data—from transaction information in data warehouses to employee tweets, from supplier records to regulatory filings—to comply with government regulations. That need has been driven even more by recent court cases that have encouraged companies to keep large quantities of documents, e-mail messages, and other electronic communications, such as instant messaging and Internet provider telephony, that may be required for e-discovery if they face litigation.
Taken from : Big Data Analytics: Turning Big Data into Big Money
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