Understanding Big Data
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People are bombarded by large sums of new information on a daily basis. There is literally so much information thrown at us every day that information overload is a normal occurrence. As a result, both individuals and companies are seeking new ways to manage an increasing volume of information.
Data has also become a huge part of every Canadian organization. Now more than ever a company’s data management has taken on a huge role and is requiring more attention, resources, and budget money. Since companies are in the habit of collecting and analyzing large sums of information and data as part of their strategic decision making process, they are also storing large sums of data. This has led to the rise of big data.
What is Big Data?
Big Data
Big data is a term that has roots in information technology. Also referred to as enterprise big data and in the context of big data analytics, it refers to processes, procedures and tools that are used by companies to manage high volumes of data and information. This includes strategies employed to develop, manage and manipulate sets of information that are outside the scope of standard software tools.
How is big data defined?
While the definition of big data will vary, here are three factors that aid in defining the term:
- Ease of use: Big data is a term that is used when companies begin to have trouble storing, sharing, and analyzing data with database management tools.
- Size of the data set: In general, big data is thought to mean terabytes, petabytes or larger sums of data. However, this number will continue to increase overtime as the need for more data grows.
- Data management: The size of big data will vary from organization to organization; however, if your company has to reconsider your data management options, then you are likely dealing with big data.
How does big data help organizations?
Big data will help Canadian companies in the following ways:
- A way to uncover more efficient methods of productivity
- The ability to uncover more subtle variances in data, performance, processes, and analytics
- A method to create new innovation
- The ability to identify trends and forecast future actions
- More detailed and specific information to be used in the decision making of key stakeholders
Things that have led to the rise of big data
There are a number of factors that have led to the rise of big data:
- The increase volume of data collected by Canadian organizations
- The increased need for more detailed information
- The need to continuously find new differentiating factors
- The rise of social media
- The integration of multimedia into the business arena
- The rise of analytics
How big data creates value for organizations
Big data will play a significant role in companies going forward. Here are a few ways that it will be able to provide value once companies implement it into their operations:
- Transparency: Big data can help to make data more transparent and available within your company. This will make it more accessible and allow people to use it more frequently.
- Policy development: Increased data and analysis will allow companies to create more accurate internal and external policies.
- Development of future strategies: Big data will assist in the development of new strategies, products, and protocols.
- Focus: Big data allows companies to create more specific and detailed products. This allows them to be extremely detailed and become more accurate in meeting their customer’s specific needs.
- Decision making accuracy: The more data and information that is collected and analyses will allow people to make more accurate decisions in all facets of your organization. This will improve overall decision making at all levels of your company.
Big Data Video
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
The open-source answer to big data Hadoop, R and NoSQL are allowing data scientists to fix the most difficult analytical problems and giving businesses a ready-made ingredient for their secret sauce. Find out how
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Yahoo's Genome and hosted big data analytics Several companies have begun offering big data analytics-as-a serviceTuesday, May 22, 2012
Why Eugene Kaspersky has big problems with big data Too much data is being collected, the head of the security company complained at his firm's conference. 'There's no privacy anymore,' he said. 
Monday, May 07, 2012
IDC: Expect big growth in Hadoop, MapReduce revenue The analyst firm predicts banner days ahead for the 'big data' programming frameworks
Monday, May 07, 2012
Big data analytics defining new malware strategy Analyzing the finer details of past threats can provide insights into the lifecycle of malware and where new threats may emerge, say experts
Wednesday, May 02, 2012
Open Data Alliance to release big data usage models Data is expected to increase by 6.7 times within the enterprise over the next five years. An industry group prepares to help businesses fight back
Monday, April 23, 2012
SAS updates its high-performance analytics offerings SAS says LASR Analytic Server capability will be added to more products, allowing rapid in-memory data analytics. The company has also upgraded its financial fraud monitoring software
Friday, April 13, 2012
Context-based computing: What the network will know Systems that understand what we're doing and what we need, even before we need it – that's long been the dream. CIOs who make it a reality will prove just how innovative they are
Thursday, April 05, 2012
Big Data Torpedoes Sales Forecasts Can cloud tools fix the problem?
Wednesday, April 04, 2012
Shell Oil targets hybrid cloud as fix for energy-saving, agile IT Oil company pilots big data analytics in the public cloud
Tuesday, April 03, 2012
Google lauds location-based intelligence There is a lot more to maps than getting from A to B, says Google's head of enterprise GEO
Friday, March 30, 2012
White House launches big data R&D push NSF and DARPA are among the agencies looking to harness the power of large volumes of data
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Oracle net income up 18%, but hardware sales slump Oracle tries to soften the hardware blow, emphasizing the company's focus on specialized systems, not commodity boxes
Monday, March 19, 2012
How to land a hot job in big data The big data revolution is creating a new breed of business-IT jobs -- and threatening to destabilize dyed-in-the-wool IT careers
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Next Hadoop confirms data as a platform Hadoop could become much more than just a storage system
Monday, March 12, 2012
Amazon hails era of 'utility supercomputing' High performance computing on-demand will revolutionise scientific research, claims AWS
Monday, March 12, 2012
Five ways to prepare for big data with scale-out NAS Storage is something you can't ignore when talking about business intelligence
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Big data creating big career opportunities for IT pros Data scientists, who typically has a background in computer science or mathematics as well as the analytical skills necessary to find the proverbial needle in a haystack, are suddenly all the rage
Thursday, March 08, 2012
Get 'Hadoop' certified . . . fast Data management software for analyzing large volumes of structured and unstructured data in a distributed manner is starting to look a lot like Java in the mid-1990s. Who's offering the training
Wednesday, March 07, 2012
Big data becomes the big topic at CEBIT 2012 The challenge of taking what's unstructured and turning it into useful information emerges as the unspoken theme of the world's largest technology trade show. Insights from Software AG, Microsoft, HP, IBM, Amazon and more
Tuesday, March 06, 2012
Microsoft finalizes SQL Server 2012 New version to be released April 1 has been bolstered with solid-state and columnar functionality
Friday, March 02, 2012
Teradata introduces more ‘intelligent’ DB analytics Teradata 14 now has the capability to query columns, a major benefit for doing business analytics
Friday, March 02, 2012
Forget big data. This is bigger data Plans call for Hadoop 0.23 to run across 6,000-machine clusters, each with 16 or more cores, and process 10,000 concurrent jobs
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Microsoft, Hortonworks to link Excel and Hadoop Microsoft teams with Hortonworks to develop an ODBC and a JavaScript library for Hadoop
Wednesday, February 29, 2012
Spring Java developers get Hadoop integration VMware's Spring Hadoop offers link between Spring development framework and Hadoop distributed processing platform