Till recently no one mentioned about big data but suddenly it has become a rage in the IT world. This is something similar to cloud computing a year or two back, when world over IT people thought cloud computing is something very cool to talk about. Same is the case with Big Data, till recently only few were even aware of something called Big Data but now everyone is rushing to get a pie of it. Though it will take some time to get proper understanding of what exactly is Big Data and how it is going to solve the enterprise problems. Let us see the formal definition of what is Big Data?
Gartner defines Big Data as “High volume, velocity and variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.” Though this definition is very technical a non-tech person will find it difficult to comprehend. Hence to put it in simple words, we can say that Big Data is a processing and analytics of large amount of data that is generated through various sources like social networking, scientific research, purchase transaction and cell phone GPS signals to get insights on users behavior and to make better decision making. Everyday more than 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are generated through various sources and more than 80% of this data is unstructured.
As per the Gartner definition Big Data spans across three different areas namely, Volume, Velocity and Variety of the data.
1. Volume: Large companies generates large amount of data/information every day. The amount of data is in terabytes or even petabytes. This information can be used for making better decision or providing better services. For instance 12 terabytes of tweet generated each day by Twitter can be utilized to improve its services and know the topics which interest users. Depending on that better services can be offered. It can be also used for billions of annual meter readings by power consumption to predict future power consumptions.
2. Velocity: When you need to make important decision even couple of minutes can mean a big thing. There are many business that run time-sensitive process and hence it is important the rate at which data is analyzed. For example scrutinizing millions of trade events to find out the fraud or analyzing the data of stock market to make quick decision etc.
3. Variety: Big Data comes in various types like structured and unstructured it can be of any thing like text, video, audio, photos, click streams, log files etc. When we analyze this data we can establish a pattern which can be used to predict user behavior or make better business decisions. Like monitoring thousands of hours of footage form surveillance cameras or analyzing millions and billions of photos, comments, text, videos and greatly help you to offers great product and services.
Big data is not merely about size it is an opportunity to find insights in new and emerging types of data and content so that it can be used to make your business more agile, competitive and better at decision making.
