What is Big Data?

Big Data is a collection of high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.

Big data is data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems. The data is too big to fit traditional data-stores, moving too fast to be churned by a single database and is unstructured enough to find a singleton correlation among existing data models. To gain value from this data, one must have a new way to store, analyze and process it.

Big Data could only be coined because certain aspects of different technologies met ways viz. cost-effective approaches to store high volume, high availability of data to reduce access time, managing multiple points of failure, processing and analyses of that huge data volumes with the distributed programming models and so forth.

Interestingly, within data lied valuable patterns of information, previously hidden because of the lack in interfaces required to access and extract them. To some of the leading corporations, such as Walmart or Google, this power had already been a forefront technology and has been in reach for some time, but at fairy expensive cost.Today’s commodity hardware, cloud architectures and software capabilities brings big data processing to the reach of the most organizations at not so denting price.

The value of big data to an organization primarily lies with its analytic use. Big data analytic’s can reveal insights hidden previously by data and too costly to process, such as peer influence effectiveness, consumer behavior, social media analytic’s, customer personification, etc. Being able to process every bit of data real-time removes the extraneous task of sampling and promotes an investigative approach to data, in contrast to the somewhat static nature of running predetermined reports.

The emergence of big data in enterprise brings the necessary agility gaining competitive advantage in terms of ROI for corporations and value for money for the consumers.