What is Big Data?

The Big Data differential is precisely linked to the possibility and opportunity to cross this data through different sources to obtain quick and precious insights. The demand of consumers and the increase in competitiveness in all markets force us to innovate and have this path as a basic premise in business.

That is why Big Data is so essential today. We are able to obtain market information through our consumers, extracting what they are saying about everything you do. Dissatisfactions, satisfactions, desires, needs, among others, are possible to capture on social media and cross with your company's internal data and thus create incredible insights.

Krish Krishnan explains why Big Data and why now because these are the two most popular questions that are crossing the minds of any computing professional:

Why Big Data? Why now? The promise of Big Data is the ability to access large volumes of data that can be useful in gaining critical insights from processing repeated or unique patterns of data or behaviors. This learning process can be executed as a machine-managed process with minimal human intervention, making the analysis simpler and error-free. The answer to the second question - Why now? - is the availability of commodity infrastructure combined with new data processing frameworks and platforms like Hadoop and NoSQL, resulting in significantly lower costs and higher scalability than traditional data management platforms. The scalability and processing architecture of the new platforms were limitations of traditional data processing technologies, though the algorithms and methods existed.

The years 2000 to 2010 have been a defining moment in the history of data, the emergence of search engines (Google, Yahoo), personalization of music (iPod), tablet computing (iPad), bigger mobile solutions (smartphones, 3 G networks, mobile broadband, Wi-Fi), and the emergence of social media (driven by Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Blogger). All these entities have contributed to the consumerization of data, from data creation, acquisition, and consumption perspectives.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Big data is a great quantity of diverse information that arrives in increasing volumes and with ever-higher velocity.

Big data can be structured (often numeric, easily formatted, and stored) or unstructured (more free-form, less quantifiable).

Nearly every department in a company can utilize findings from big data analysis but handling its clutter and noise can pose problems.

References:

Investopedia. (2019). The Deal With Big Data. [online] Available at: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/big-data.asp [Accessed 28 Jan. 2020].

Krishnan, K. (2013). Data Warehousing in the Age of Big Data. 1st ed. Morgan Kaufmann.