Big Data Analytics: The future now

We are witnessing today what can be safely referred to as data explosion – no pun intended. Every second, servers around the world are inundated with so much data. To put that in context for you; everyday, we create 2.5 Exabyte (10¹⁸) of data, so much that 90% of the world’s data today has been created in just the last two years alone, according to an IDC finding. Today, one in every 5 people in the world own a Smartphone, 3 billion people worldwide have access to the internet, thanks to a growing middle class around the world, increased connectivity of smart devices culminating in what’s being called the Internet of Things (IoT), and much more, all contributing to the enormous amount of data flooding our cyberspace, server farms and storage devices around the clock. So what exactly is Big Data, and why should you care?

Big Data for the most part is a catch phrase, or buzzword if you like, to describe the huge volume of structured and unstructured data, too large (volume), too fast moving (velocity), and too complicated (variety), to be processed using the traditional database management systems and software techniques. The idea here is basically to analyze all those data as a whole, as opposed to just doing so in separate smaller sets, to derive additional information allowing correlations to be found.

If you’re still wondering where all that data is coming from, consider that there are over 800 million active Facebook users, typically posting around 90 pieces of content per month; everyday, over 500 million tweets are sent out by Twitter users; every single minute, 48 hours of new YouTube videos are uploaded and 571 new websites are created. These figures, as stratospheric as they are now, will double in the next 18 months. That kind of gives you a sense of what we’re up against. It is in fact a very positive thing that the world as we know is it is becoming ever more connected, also given that world’s capacity to store information has roughly doubled every 40 months since the 1980s, we’re finding it less difficult to store data, however more difficult to make sense of all of them. The ordinary database software techniques that have served in the past are no good for this new deluge, which is where Big Data analytics comes in.

Instead of just sitting there in storage receptacles, these piles of data available to enterprises can actually be analyzed for actionable insights and future projections. With the right big data analytics platforms in place, businesses can boost sales, reduce cost, increase efficiency, and improve operations, customer experience and risk management.  

With typical Big Data flooding in their thousands of Terabytes, making sense of them is vital to modern businesses, governments and organizations seeking to gain some form of comparative advantage in a fast evolving digital age. Even though current algorithms are still a long way from making accurate predictions beyond real-time (what you may see as some art of digital fortune- telling), there is however no doubt we're having a slice of the future now.