What is Big Data?
Raza Sheikh
Author
Jan 10, 2021
What is Big Data?
Big data is a term that was coined by William H. Inmon in 1996. The purpose of using this term was to explain the management problems in processing large amounts of data. The term big data has been coined to describe the massive amounts of data created all around the world every day. It is used in a variety of industries and fields such as business, medical, cyber-security, and social sciences.
Big data pulls in from a variety of sources numerous types of structured and unstructured data such as articles, tweets, blogs, forums, images, video content, sensors, satellites, patients, mobile gadgets and applications, videos, web logs etc. Big data analytics methods such as machine learning and statistical analysis techniques are used to get valuable insights by analyzing big data.
There are many definitions of Big Data, but we will not just focus on the definition but the importance of the growth of Big Data and its implications to organizational development.
The Internet of Things (IoT), massive amounts of data, the cloud. It’s all adding up to exponential data growth.
Big Data in principle is data so large in size and complexity that none of the traditional data management tools can store it or process it efficiently. It is also data with so large size and so complex that traditional data analysis tools cannot deal with it efficiently.
For instance, the data of Facebook (The platform with nearly 2.45 billion monthly active users). posts alone each user makes every day would occupy more than 300 MB per day resulting in more than 200 PB of data every year.
1.62 billion users visit Facebook daily.
While it might seem like there’s an urge to use social media less, the data shows otherwise. Facebook’s overall active users continue to increase every year across the platform as a whole.
Big Data is making strides in almost every corporation, with the majority of businesses coming to an understanding that big data is a core value in terms of improving the operational efficiency of the business. Big data analytics equip businesses with actionable insights and value to make strategic market decisions.
Although the data volume in big data is huge, the data variety is even more so. It contains structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data such as images, videos, social networking posts, weather data, medical records …… In addition to the large volume of data, its complexity is growing exponentially with time. It can contain information from multiple sources and in various formats. This makes it difficult for traditional databases and file systems to store and process them effectively.
What Makes Big Data Big?
As the name suggests, the data is big in size. It is not always about how much data we store but also about the data generated every second and that too from various sources, including social media and numerous sensors… Big data may contain petabytes of information with respect to their storage capacities which cannot be accessed by any single machine or software. This is because of its complexity in nature.
Big data has all that one can ask for – a reasonable size of data, but the speed and agility make it really challenging to deal with. It is a fast-growing breed of data generation which leads to new opportunities of using it at a new level. Big data today makes the headlines, but no one is effectively making use of it. We are in the initial stage where big data are searched to sort out all our issues. Give some time and search will give results. Big data is a good step towards an effective solution to present-day problems.
What is unstructured data? It is any data that has not been classified, categorized, and sorted. Examples include unstructured text, emails, and other digital forms of data. As the need for more information increases, the amount of structured data available decreases. Structured data can include any of the following: sales records, insurance quotes, loan information, and customer lists.
Big Data visualization tools refer to tools that enable users to explore, analyze, and visualize big data sets. By “big,” it is meant large data sets; therefore, it encompasses all types of unstructured data. By way of example, say you have a website with millions of visitors. You could analyze the leads you are getting from the website using a piece of data management tool like AI Surge and visualize your visitors’ relationships with each other.
Big Data is an issue that is gaining much visibility and for good reasons, Big Data will be a key to unlock many of business uncertainties. Companies would typically need machine learning engineers and data scientists to extract useful information from these massive amounts of data. But not anymore. No Code Data Analytics tools like AI Surge comes embedded in its functionality machine learning and automation capabilities.
Advanced analytics for businesses and the ability to make better decisions. From simple business observations to complex scientific analysis, Big Data has transformed nearly every industry, including medicine, law enforcement, aerospace, energy, and transportation.
In today’s Big Data era, organizations are generating a huge quantity of data. The key question is how to utilize big data and extract insights that can be useful for business. Businesses that master the art of analyzing big data have achieved a competitive advantage over their counterparts as they can provide valuable insights for their companies. Big Data has become one of the hottest topics in the market.
Big data has become an important tool for decision-making and is used by all the critical industries across the globe. Due to the numerous benefits it offers, big data is also referred to as a competitive weapon by many organizations. Big data helps in strengthening your marketing techniques, e-commerce strategies, risk analysis, supply chain management, and provide a better customer experience etc. When it comes to big data technology there are numerous tools and software that can help you achieve your business goals. With the advancement of big data technologies, it has become crucial for organizations to focus on the right technique for analyzing their big data in order to gain insights out of it.
The future of business seems to be rooted in increasing globalization and every organization has to remain competitive. The modern-day “Big Data” solutions are based on data analytics to decisions, to understand customers better, and to improve the quality of any business process. These analytics are based on include structured Big Data management tools.
In the past, data mining was used to locate certain patterns or anomalies in large amounts of unstructured data. However, with the recent boom in AI Driven analytics platforms like AI Surge, analyzing large amounts of unstructured data can also be applied as analytics. Examples of such large amounts include web page rankings, product searches, social media data, and location searches. Today, there are many different varieties of analytics applications, and several different approaches to storing, organizing, and running this big data. Here are some examples:
If you need to apply insights from social media to your business model, AI Surge will be your best friend. Social media allows us to connect and interact with people around the world in a highly dynamic way, which makes it an excellent tool for data mining. The social media network has enabled many business owners to create personalized news feeds that show only the most relevant posts to users based on their interests. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn can also be used for analytics because of their open-source nature.
With AI Surge you are able to visualize the relationships among various sources like business processes, sales, customer lists, and more. AI Remedies, the name was given to AI Surge’s beautiful dashboards allows businesses to visualize and provide insight into how people use and access your products and services. By providing insight into these various sources, Big Data analytics enables businesses to make informed decisions about expanding their business, implementing solutions to improve their performance, and monitoring user trends. Companies looking to apply Big Data analytics in their organization can try out AI Surge for free to start making sense of their Big Data.
Big Data has infinite potential to change the world we live in forever.