What is Big Data ? - A Basic Overview

Big data is a term that refers to the growing amount of data being processed, collected, and analyzed in the information age. The term was first introduced by IBM in the 1990s to address their increasingly large volume of raw data.

Big Data: The Tech-Freak

 

This post will discuss what big data is, how it has been used historically alongside some more recent examples of its use, and what can be expected for the future under this new paradigm. If you're interested in learning more about big data or if you are curious about how it might affect your life (or career) then this blog post will give you ample opportunity to learn new things!

The United States Intelligence Community (USIC) defines it as follows: "Big data is a term used to describe the large volume of data being created and managed (often in conjunction with the capture of real-time information). Big data refers to data sets so large and complex that they become difficult to process using on-hand database management tools. The ultimate value of big data analytics is to extract useful information, insights, and knowledge from large volumes of raw, structured, unstructured or semi-structured data."

Big Data: The Tech-Freak

By some estimates, the sum total of human knowledge doubles every five years. One researcher calculated that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone. The world's technological capacity to store information has approximately doubled every 40 months since 1986. In the digital age, businesses and governments collect, store, manage, and analyze enormous amounts of data.

Big data takes on a whole new meaning when we consider today's volumes of electronically recorded data: videos created, shared, and viewed online; search engine queries; websites browsed; social media statuses updated; locations checked in to using location-based social services like Foursquare; purchases made online or in physical stores using credit cards or stored value cards such as the Starbucks card, etc. – the list goes on. In a single day, companies record and store more data than all of humanity achieved from writing to the invention of the internet until 2007. It's estimated that one in three people on earth now have the ability to take digital photographs and this number is growing rapidly.

Companies, governments, and institutions spend billions each year collecting, storing, managing, analyzing, and visualizing data – a very small percentage of which is useful or acted upon. The amount of data that organizations are collecting is increasing exponentially; companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook are collecting terabytes (1 trillion bytes) per day for storage purposes alone. They collect around 2 billion gigabytes (2 billion million bytes) per day for content management purposes. There is no way to store this amount of data in a conventional database.

Big Data: The Tech-Freak

Data collection makes sense when it's relevant to the users and actionable in their hands. An example would be a retailer that tracks customer purchases to identify products that are frequently purchased together, which might indicate that customers are looking for a specific product.

The primary difference between big data and conventional digital data is the ability to capture it in its raw form. While "big data" can be defined as high volume (petabytes), high velocity (terabytes per second), and/or high variety (multiple terabytes), it's also the most recent stage of an evolving definition of information technology, whose scope includes both software development and hardware construction.

So, we hope that you get the basic idea of What basically BIG DATA is. Subscribe to our blog for such amazing informative content.