What Does Big Data Mean to You?
As a company that for many years has been committed to delivering end-to-end data platform technologies to our customers, we’re excited about all the attention big data is receiving from press, analysts and the industry. While all the pundits are in general agreement that big data is the next greatest IT trend, the definition of big data varies depending on the source.
What do we mean when we say big data? We mean data that is so large, so complex or collected at such a fast pace that it challenges the capabilities of traditional data management systems. Any organization looking at their current data infrastructure and seeing a significant shift the volume, variety or velocity of data is experiencing big data.
- Data volume is growing by 10 times every 5 years, According to a recent IDC report, the volume of digital records is forecasted to hit 1.2M zetabytes (1021 bytes) this year – and predicted to grow 44 times over the next decade.
- The variety of data is also challenging traditional data storage technologies — up to 85% of new data is unstructured, such as Facebook posts, tweets, photos, videos search engine queries, etc.
- Finally, the velocity of data creates new challenges as organizations now nearly instantaneously capture vast amounts of data from websites, machine generated data like sensors on smart grids, point-of-sale devices and other sources.
The real promise of big data is to enable every type of organization to harness all their data and discover insights that help them do whatever they do – better. We’re here to help with tools and solutions to help make sense of all that big data – helping our customers make faster, better decisions.
We’ll have more to share on big data trends and solutions over the next few weeks and months – stay tuned!
