Big data concepts is relatively a new concept in Information technology. But practice of gathering, storing large volume of data for analysis is not new. Big data gets momentum in the early 2000s when industry analyst doug laney first clearly explain the term. In this article i will explain what is big data, it’s importance, who uses it and how it works.
What is big data concepts
Big data can be defined as any voluminous or expansive amount of structured, semi-structured, unstructured data that has potential to analyze for getting valuable information. Big data can also defined by four v’s. Here are those four v’s:
- Volume: It refers to amount of data. In big data concepts there is not a specific amount of data. Volume of data could be be terabytes, petabytes and even exabytes of data. even exabytes of data. Organizations can collect this extremely large volume of data from different sources like business sales, records, social media.
- Velocity: the fast rate at which data is received.
- Variety: It means types of data.For example numeric data, text, video, audio, unstructured data.
- Value: In this concepts data has genuine value. But it must be discovered. There are a range of quantitative and investigative techniques to derive value from data—from discovering a consumer preference or sentiment, to making a relevant offer by location, or for identifying a piece of equipment that is about to fail.
Why big data is important?
Big data is important for the following reasons:
- Understand market condition: Big data analysis reveal current market condition. For example by analyzing customers purchasing trend a business can explore which products are sold out most. It can also predicts the future product items that will get popularity among consumers.
- Understand customer better: Customer behavior can be assume by analyzing big data. Analysis shows customers preference towards products of various types. Companies then supply those products in advance to satisfy customers. Business also get alert about products quality by analyzing customers comment in social media.
- Cost savings: Implementing big data concepts in organizations is costly initially. But it will be cost savings eventually. Because big data tools acts in real time manner. So management of organizations can get rid of keeping large number of IT stuffs. In addition, storage of large volume of data is not that expensive now.
Who are using big data
Health care: In health care big data consists of patients records, insurance, health plans. By analyzing this data health care providers can provide lifesaving diagnoses or treatment options almost immediately.
Retail: Big data analytics technology helps retailers to understand what customers want and when. So they can supply popular items in advance. Analyzing data related to customer buying habits retailers can also predict correctly future products in demand.
Governments: Governments combat crime by analyzing data related to crimes. It can map out crime trend and there by set up action plan to reduce crime rate.
How big data works for your business
In order to make big data work for your business you need to research the technologies. This includes
- Cheap and excessive amount of storage
- Faster processors
- Open source, distributed big data platforms, for example Hadoop.
- Parallel processing, clustering, MPP, virtualization, large grid environments, high connectivity and high throughputs.
- Cloud computing and other flexible resource allocation arrangements.