Big Data
AnalyticsDeep
Dive
Deriving Meaning
From the
Data Explosion
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Big Data AnalyticsDeep Dive
Making sense of big data
New analysis tools and abundant processing power unlock critical insights from unfathomable volumes of corporate and external data i By David S. Linthicum
THE ABILITY TO DERIVE MEANING quickly from huge quantities of structured and unstructured data has been an objective of enterprise IT since the inception of databases. In the past, this has been a distant dream — or at least a cost-prohibitive one.
Today we have a growing number of technologies that make that dream a reality. Cloud computing provides per-drink access to thousands of processor cores and massive amounts of on-demand data storage. Emerging technologies apply a divide-and-conquer approach to big data computing problems, using distributed processing to return results almost instantaneously from huge data sets.
New analytics tools take advantage of all this horsepower. Advanced data visualization technology makes large and complex data sets understandable and enables domain experts to spot underlying trends and patterns.
Some tools even recognize patterns and alert users about issues that need attention.
Big data is riding a sharp growth curve. IDC predicts big data technology and services will grow worldwide from $3.2 billion in 2010 to $16.9 billion in 2015. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 40 percent — about seven times that of the overall information and communications technology market.
MAKING THE BUSINESS CASE
The business benefits are clear. On the one hand, we can derive meaning from data that once merely took up space — website clickstream data, system event logs, and so on — and use that information to improve a broad range of systems. A whole new world of vertical applications opens up.
What sort of applications?