What is BIG DATA?

Big data is a buzzword in business. This term is used to describe a problem caused by exponential growth and availability of data. Industry has defined this term as the three Vs.

1. Velocity
2. Variety
3. Volume

Velocity: In today’s world data is being generated at never before speed. Think of social media sites on internet, millions of people generating social interaction data every second. This size could be terabytes at least every hour. This growth bursts when machines start generating data instead of humans. Think of sensors and tracking devices etc.

Variety: Data today comes in all types of formats. This may be structured data as in our traditional databases, unstructured text data like documents, emails, various logs etc and may be pictures, images, audio and video.

Volume: When verities of data comes in extremely high velocity from various sources like business and financial transactions of years, social interactions of millions of people every day and machine to machine interactions etc volume is a real problem at the bottom. Earlier days, storage used to be a problem but decreasing cost of storage allows businesses to be able to store all of them. This makes a really BIG DATA available to business which was not earlier.

Ok, then what’s the problem here? Well, the problems are two.

1. What to do with this data?
2. How to do it?

It is important to understand that the first problem “What to do with this data?” is really a business problem. Second one (How to do it?) is probably a shared problem between business and IT.