How Big Is BIG DATA?

Did you ever wonder when you upload your picture or change a status or even comments on your friends profile, how does it get stored? Have you ever imagined the size of the data that millions of users create every day? How is it managed?

As a matter of fact the world’s technological per-capita capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s, as of 2012, every day 2.5 quintillion (2.5×10raised to power18) bytes of data were created. Because of the ever growing technological advancement extremely large quantities of data is being generated. This large chunk of data remains unused since the organizations are still trying and finding ways on how they can utilize the data to its maximum and use it to their advantage. Forrester Research estimates that organizations effectively utilize less than 5 percent of their available data. Here comes the Big Data technology to their rescue. It would open new doors and new avenues for the Enterprise. It can be a path for them in becoming tomorrow’s leaders. It might help them in analyzing markets, understand customer, know their needs and pathways to new business.

Examples – Big Data Use

*The U.S. federal government collects more than 370,000 raw and geospatial datasets from 172 agencies and sub agencies. It leverages that data to provide a portal to 230 citizen-developed apps.

*Professional social network LinkedIn uses data from its more than 100 million users to build new social products based on users’ own definitions of their skill sets.

*Facebook has more than 800 million active users, and there are more than 900 million objects (pages, groups, events and community pages) that people interact with. Facebook users spend over 700 billion minutes per month on the site, creating on average 90 pieces of content and sharing 30 billion pieces of content each month. Facebook’s data infrastructure team is responsible for quickly analyzing all of that data to present it to users in the most relevant way.

A number of recent technology advancements are enabling organizations to make the most of big data and big data analytics:

With the new technology advancements, many factors help Organizations tap the power of big data:

*Open-source software framework like hadoop for analyzing data

*Use of MapReduce -programming model for large data sets

*Use of Google file systems

*NoSQL as database management systems

Only future can tell if Big data is going to be really big deal. But the analyst say it might even be the future.