Digital Transformation

CHAPTER 13Big Data

This chapter provides an overview of big data technology, and its ability to enable agile business decisions based on information visibility and analytics capabilities. It also discusses the technology components and the architecture involved along with the use cases and opportunities across industries to make the enterprise intelligent with data‐driven insight.

Big Data Overview

With the growth of digital media and content creation, the amount of available storage capacity in any form of a disk is becoming redundant. Based on the estimated 44 zettabytes, which is equivalent to 44 trillion gigabytes, of data that we have created, less than 15% can be stored in any form of storage media.

Big data refers to very large and complex data sets that cannot be stored or processed by traditional data analytics tools and methods. Big data technology has emerged as an improvement to the existing infrastructure for the enterprise to store, access, and harness the value of data for better insights and decision making to drive innovation.

The economics of data is based on the idea that value can be extracted through analytics. Big data is changing the way analytics were commonly viewed—it is about extracting valuable insight from data, not about transforming data into information through dashboards and reports.

Data Explosion

With the amount of unstructured data getting doubled every couple of months, below are some facts about how the data is exploding every second: ...