We all know that ‘Big Data & Analytics’ is the emerging trend in the IT industry. The fact that 90% of the data today was created in the last two years is no surprise, considering the staggering petabytes (1015) of data generated by Facebook, Twitter & Google every day. Believe it or not, it is predicted that 40 Zettabytes (1021) of data will be created by 2020!
So, what is Big Data? Why is it important? What are the different types of data? Different approaches? How has it become a critical source of information for today’s business world?
Way back in the 90’s, companies used to conduct feedback surveys on small samples and there used to be debates amongst industrial experts to find the result. But that was not accurate. This inaccuracy is marginally improved by Data Warehousing technology that churns out the most relevant and microscopic data from different sources (repository, web log, transactions, third party statistics, market trends & competitor pricing), stacks them together on one big, expensive server and runs statistical algorithms to find the result. This is the current industry standard for the decision support system. But the main drawbacks of data warehousing are the algorithm working only for small samples of data collected from different sources and a high turnaround time for meaningful results. This huge load of data is called Big Data and the tools with which we can process & analyze Big Data are known as Big Data Tools.
Majority of the people do not know what to do with all the data they already have! It is vital to understand that Big Data is not about the size of the data, it’s about the value within the data. The ultimate objective is to generate some sort of value for the company conducting the analysis. The more historical data you have, better will be the strategic & tactical decisions/predictions taken to run organizations effectively!
The Big Data market surely is booming! Wikibon projects it to hit $84B in 2026, at a CAGR of 17% from 2011 to 2026. The Hadoop market is forecasted to grow at a CAGR of 58%, surpassing $1 billion by 2020! So, if you haven’t embarked on it yet, it is high time you do! Leverage the power of Big Data and reshape your future with enhanced productivity and competitive advantage. Make sure you thoroughly analyze main factors like cost, performance, memory size, hardware, scheduling and algorithm and optimize the critical ones right from the beginning in your software development life cycle.
