Big Data- No one can hide from it!

Believe it or not life is like an open book for each one of us these days. We leave our digital trace every minute no matter what we do. Such traces more known as data gave birth to a phenomenal concept called “Big Data”.

So why Big Data now? “From the dawn of civilization until 2003, humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days...and the pace is accelerating.” says, Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google.

Listening to the music digitally, watching movies on Netflix record our music and movie preferences. Credit card companies follow and store data about our lifestyle penchants. Not only activities but even conversations on Facebook, Twitter and phone are now being digitally recorded. With all those pictures taken through smart phones and videos retrieved from CCTV, that are being constantly shared on social media and YouTube are also being a major source of data. Sensors on many devices also track our location and travel directions etc that could be used in our “Big Data” The Internet of Things also provide it's own share of data through smart TVs, watches and things like that.

Big Data is predominantly supported by four pillars or rather 4 Vs. Volume, Velocity, Variety and Veracity. Volume of data is enormous these days, from Terrabytes we are now talking about Zettabytes and Brontobytes. Velocity has moved to an unimaginable level, think about a video going viral in few seconds on a social media. And there is a bombardment in variety. Data is now a combination of unstructured form of text, voice, video etc. And finally veracity talks about the accuracy of such complicated data. Technologies greatly facilitates to work on that front.

Now turning Big Data into value is the pot of gold that all companies are looking for. All these activities, conversations, photos and videos are valuable if they result in text analytics, sentiment analysis, movement analytics etc. Such valuable information can provide companies a huge edge to know what products to place in front of the customer's eyes to bump up sales. Insurance companies can know way ahead about the illness and customer's driving skills. Inventory management will be a piece of cake if we know whats going to move out of the shelf first. Last year Amazon was talking about “anticipatory or speculative shipping”, it means to ship products before even the customer places an order. Such quick delivery of products would reduce the customer dependency on brick and mortar stores for: immediacy.

Big Data can also prevent epidemic breaks, say for example data retrieved from a Google search “cold&flu symptoms” can do the trick. And it can also help control crimes and detect fraudulent transactions. In future Big Data and IoT will be the ones to create smart cities and countries by automatically rerouting traffic and other mode of transportation for maximum efficiency.

In short, Big Data is going to be the next big thing that revolutionizes every company, industry and country.

Reference: Big Data by Bernard Barr