Big Data refers to the huge storage which deals with large amount of information data in form of structured and unstructured data. The increase in technology yields modern services such as E commerce, cloud based services but at the same time has huge impact on business controls. Organizations are facing many challenges in terms of data management such as storage, retrieval, analysis and data-collection. These things are becoming difficult to manage through traditional information process.
For instance, the New York stock exchange produces approx. 1TB (terabyte) of data every day, Twitter produces approx. 7 TB of data and Facebook gets more than 10TB of data every day. Dealing with such big chunk of data every day is not easy for anyone because it requires huge database to manage, control and process the data. With big data, today people are able to make insightful analysis and are able to derive great value from it. It is adding value to businesses as many organizations are checking the patterns in data to discover the consumer behavior. Since big data is providing abundant data storage, organizations are able to solve critical issues by doing the statistical analysis of the entire data.
The features of Big Data can be classified as four ‘V’s which is volume, velocity, variety and value.
Volume
Volume in Big Data indicates large amount of data stored from various sources. The storage scale of data keeps increasing from Gigabyte (GB) to Terabyte (TB) followed by petabyte, Exabyte and Zettabyte. There is no end to the volume of data getting added to the system.
Velocity
Velocity in Big Data means not only intake of data but also process, analyze and utilize the data effectively. If you are dealing with more number of clients then you have to face a velocity related issue and challenges can be prevented by increasing the supported cloud storage.
Variety
Big data can have varied data structures, while some can be structured such as numerical data others can have unstructured formats like audio, video and text. Earlier the data processing was simple but with increase in technology like social networking, IOT (Internet of things), mobile computing and selling advertisements, the complexity in dealing with unstructured data is also increasing. Dealing with such huge data has become a great burden for companies both in monitoring the transactions and do analytical research to derive the conclusions.
Value
It is obvious that with increase in technology, internet data is increasing enormously. The technological advance is also affecting the cost of data storage and processing abilities. Since big data contains different data formats like voice, text, video etc, it becomes difficult to process the data and derive real value from it. The extent to which data has to be processed to get information is measured as value density or information per Terabyte. The challenge is to filter the data for valuable information and structure it for usage. Value density in big data should be a continuous process, as the data keeps on increasing it should get processed and structured for better usage.
Application of Big Data
Retail Industry
It’s true that Big Data and Analytics can’t replace the creative minds but now smart marketers are relying on data more than ever. They are using it as a tool to perform better. Big Data is implemented at every step in retail sector to help customer predict the best deals, get latest information on products and have flexibility to access the products 24*7.
Science and Research
Big Data plays a very crucial role in improving science and research. For instance, CERN a nuclear research organization requires 65,000 processors to compute and analyze approximately 30 PB (petabytes) of data every day. Since it is a huge data to deal with, they are depending on huge number of data centers to process the data.
Health and Life Sciences
Big data is now being used in healthcare industry to become more efficient and productive. It is used in applications for clinical and disease pattern analysis, quality care of patient, discovery of drug and development, application of wearable devices etc. By collecting the medical data into one system, it becomes easy to know as much information as possible about a patient. This gives scope for the medical professionals to resolve the health issue easily.
Digital and Web Media
Big Data improves Ad targeting, forecasting, social media analysis and optimization. Big data allows digital advertisers collect the relevant data from different sources and do the analysis of information for better personalized and targeted ads.