Big-Data

While the term "big data" is relatively new, the act of gathering and storing large amounts of information for eventual analysis is ages old. The concept gained momentum in the early 2000s when industry analyst Doug Laney articulated the now-mainstream definition of big data as the three

  • Volume: Organizations collect data from a variety of sources, including business transactions, social media and information from sensor or machine-to-machine data. In the past, storing it would've been a problem - but new technologies (such as Hadoop) have eased the burden.
  • Velocity:Data streams in at an unprecedented speed and must be dealt with in a timely manner. RFID tags, sensors and smart metering are driving the need to deal with torrents of data in near-real time.
  • Variety:Data comes in all types of formats - from structured, numeric data in traditional databases to unstructured text documents, email, video, audio, stock ticker data and financial transactions.

  • Variability:In addition to the increasing velocities and varieties of data, data flows can be highly inconsistent with periodic peaks. Is something trending in social media? Daily, seasonal and event-triggered peak data loads can be challenging to manage. Even more so with unstructured data.
  • Complexity:Today's data comes from multiple sources, which makes it difficult to link, match, cleanse and transform data across systems. However, it's necessary to connect and correlate relationships, hierarchies and multiple data linkages or your data can quickly spiral out of control.
  • Big data's big potential:The amount of data that's being created and stored on a global level is almost inconceivable, and it just keeps growing. That means there's even more potential to glean key insights from business information - yet only a small percentage of data is actually analyzed. What does that mean for businesses? How can they make better use of the raw information that flows into their organizations every day?


Big data analytics

Big data analytics is the process of examining large and varied data sets -- i.e.big data -- to uncover hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and other useful information that can help organizations make more-informed business decisions.



Big data analytics benefits

Big data analytics applications enable data scientists, predictive modelers, statisticians and other analytics professionals to analyze growing volumes of structured transaction data, plus other forms of data that are often left untapped by conventional business intelligence (BI) and analytics programs. That encompasses a mix of semi-structured and unstructured data -- for example, internet clickstream data, web server logs, social media content, text from customer emails and survey responses, mobile-phone call-detail records and machine data captured by sensors connected to the internet of things.