How big is BIG DATA?
Have you ever wondered when you upload your photo or change a status or even comment on your friends’ profile, how is it stored? Have you ever imagined the size of the data that millions of users create every day? How is it managed?
In fact, the world’s per capita technological capacity to store information has doubled approximately every 40 months since the 1980s, as of 2012, 2.5 quintillion (2.5 × 10 raised to the 18th power) were created each day data byte. Due to constant technological advancement, extremely large amounts of data are generated. This large part of the data remains unused, as organizations are still trying and finding ways to use the data to its fullest and use it to their advantage. Forrester Research estimates that organizations actually use less than 5 percent of their available data. Here comes Big Data technology to your rescue. It would open new doors and new paths for the Enterprise. It can be a path for them to become the leaders of tomorrow. It could help them analyze markets, understand the customer, know their needs and paths to new business.
Examples – Use of Big Data
*The US federal government collects more than 370,000 geospatial and raw data sets from 172 agencies and subagencies. It leverages that data to provide a portal to 230 citizen-developed apps.
*The professional social network LinkedIn uses data from its more than 100 million users to create new social products based on users’ own definitions of skill sets.
*Facebook has more than 800 million active users and there are more than 900 million things (pages, groups, events, and community pages) that people interact with. Facebook users spend more than 700 billion minutes per month on the site, creating an average of 90 pieces of content and sharing 30 billion pieces of content each month. Facebook’s data infrastructure team is responsible for quickly analyzing all that data to present it to users in the most relevant way.
A number of recent technological advances are enabling organizations to take full advantage of big data and big data analytics:
With new technological advances, many factors help organizations harness the power of big data:
*Open source software framework like hadoop to analyze data
*Using the MapReduce programming model for large data sets
*Use of Google file systems
*NoSQL as database management systems
Only the future can tell if Big Data is really going to be a big deal. But the analyst says that could even be the future.
