Information Technology has drastically changed the way industries work and handle their problems. Data has become one crucial component that decides the growth of many companies, even for the top most company in the world like Wal-Mart.
“Useful” information is hidden behind every piece of data and the organizations expertise to extract the same makes the difference if they get an edge over competitors or stand in the long queue far behind. Data has transformed from the state of a storage phenomenon to a source that acts as a key tool in the development of the organizations.
Why is data becoming more valuable?? Well, the solution to this question lies in understanding the increase of customer needs, change in their buying behavior, fluctuations in consumption, changing market trends, etc. One can realize that the marketplace is very dynamic. Raw data thus becomes key contributors helping in understanding the hidden information and utilizing the market potential.
Two IT initiatives which are top of mind among every IT organization are Big Data Analytics and Cloud Computing. Big Data can be described as the term used when characteristics of data like volume, variety and velocity exceeds the storage capacity and data handling capability of the company. These characteristics are also referred to as 3 V’s of Big Data! Often, Big Data use to find solutions for accurate and timely decision making. Big Data are characterized with being huge in size (volume), streaming & updated frequently (velocity) and difference & complexity of data sets (variety).
Big Data analytics helps in acquiring valuable insights of the data, while cloud computing works as a delivery model that provides greater agility and productivity to the business with greater efficiency and cost effectiveness. Both these technologies are actively constructed and utilized in most of the top companies. Big Data is acquired from various sources, ranging from a remote pseudo-mode PC to multi-nodal clusters. The real value of Big Data lies in gaining insights of data, recognizing patterns, as indicators of decision making and providing greater intelligence to use data. Data analytics is moving from batch processing to real-time working data. Managers are trying to get insights of data in a real-time or nearly real-time basis. This real-time analyzing of data helps in predictive analytics too. Predictive analytics generally provides future scope of what the business is all about and helps in predicting the future course of actions the company has to take for exploiting the opportunities in the market. Big Data has an ever growing potential and it is especially with the social media such as Facebooks, Twitter, emails, YouTube, blogs, etc. It has relevant capacity to extract data from the social “unstructured” data repositories, especially streaming data like Facebook posts.
On the other hand, cloud computing is gaining popularity in use for enterprise applications. Cloud computing gives a better framework and environment for working on Big Data problems. It will be meaningful and most effective for organizations to construct and maintain a cloud computing structure for handling Big Data projects. It is flexible, cost-effective and provides the best approach to evaluate the business problems for IT industries. Organizations can add Big Data analytics to their in-house offerings when they have a service provider or a hybrid cloud computing setup. There are three main service provided by cloud computing: Software as a Service (SaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS). In addition to them, cloud computing has introduced another service named as AaaS – Analytics as a Service. It is used across full range of cloud that can address to full range of analytics requirement by client. It extracts the related data from the cloud, manage and control data performing data integration. Big Data projects needs using Hadoop for analyzing data, which has MapReduce framework that mainly does the work of processing the data. Scalability is the main property which is available in both Hadoop and cloud computing. This makes them homogenously co-exist to produce the best outcomes.
Big Data addresses enterprise level issues and predictive analytics capability. It could produce better forecast that might even reduce problems like adverse global warming, socio-economic problems, etc. Clubbed with cloud computing, Big Data could achieve far more heights as well. In short, cloud computing and Big Data rules the world, no matter what industry is in concern. It is up-to the organizations to utilize the technology and boost their stand in the market!
This article is written by Bhoopal, Sr. Research Analyst DART Consulting.
