Big Data Overview — Types, Characteristics Advantages

Palak Mazumdar
Sep 8, 2018 · 5 min read

Recently the term Big Data has been in the spotlight, but not many people know what big data is. Businesses, governmental institutions, HCPs (Health Care Providers), and financial as well as academic institutions, are all leveraging the capability of Big Data to improve business prospects along with improved customer experience. IBM maintains that businesses around the world generate nearly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data daily! Approximately 90% of the global data has been produced in the last two years alone.

So we know for sure that Big Data has entered almost every industry today and is a powerful driving force after the success of enterprises and organizations across the globe. But, at this point, it is necessary to know what big data is?

What is Big Data?

“Big data” is high-volume, velocity, and variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.

This definition answers the “what is Big Data?” question — Big Data refers to complicated and big data sets that have to be processed and analyzed to reveal valuable information that can benefit businesses and organizations. However, there are certain basic principles of Big Data that will make it even simpler to answer what is Big Data:

· It refers to a massive amount of data that keeps on growing exponentially with time.

· It is so large that it cannot be processed or analyzed using the conventional data processing techniques.

· It includes data mining, data storage, data analysis, data sharing, and data visualization.

The term is an all-comprehensive one including data, data structures, along with the tools and systems used to process and analyze the data.

Types of Big Data

Now that we’re on track with what is big data, let’s have a look at the forms of big data:

Structured:

With structured data, we suggest data that can be processed, stored, and retrieved in a fixed format. It refers to highly organized information that can be immediately and aimlessly stored and accessed from a database by simple search engine algorithms. For instance, the employee table in a company database will be structured as the employee details, their job positions, their salaries, etc., will be present in an organized manner.

Unstructured:

Unstructured data points to the data that lacks any specific form or structure whatsoever. This makes it very difficult and time-consuming to process and analyze unstructured data. Email is an example of unstructured data.

Semi-structured:

Semi-structured data apply to the data containing both the formats mentioned above, that is, structured and unstructured data. To be precise, it refers to the data that although has not been classified under a particular database, yet includes essential information or tags that segregate individual portions within the data.

Characteristics of Big Data

These characteristics, isolatedly, are sufficient to know what is big data. Let’s look at them in depth:

Variety:

Variety of Big Data relates to structured, unstructured, and semistructured data that is managed from multiple sources. While in the past, data could only be obtained from spreadsheets and databases, today data comes in an array of forms such as emails, PDFs, photos, videos, audios, SM posts, and so much more.

Velocity:

Velocity relates to the rapidity at which data is being created in real-time. In a broader prospect, it comprises the rate of change, linking of incoming data sets at varying speeds, and activity bursts.

Volume:

The Big Data means large ‘volumes’ of data that is being generated on a daily basis from various sources like social media platforms, business processes, machines, networks, human interactions, etc. Such a large amount of data are stored in data warehouses.

Big Data Roles and Payrolls in the Finance Industry

Advantages of Big Data:

One of the several significant benefits of Big Data is predictive analysis. Big Data analytics tools can predict outcomes accurately, thereby, allowing businesses and organizations to make better decisions, while simultaneously optimizing their operational efficiencies and reducing risks.

By providing data from social media platforms using Big Data analytics tools, businesses around the world are streamlining their digital marketing strategies to enhance the overall consumer experience. Big Data provides insights into the customer pain points and allows companies to improve upon their products and services.

Being right, Big Data combines relevant data from multiple sources to produce highly actionable insights. Almost 43% of companies lack the necessary tools to filter out irrelevant data, which eventually costs them millions of dollars to hash out useful data from the bulk. Big Data tools can help reduce this, saving you both time and money.

Big Data analytics could help companies generate more sales leads which would naturally mean a boost in revenue. Businesses are using Big Data analytics tools to understand how well their products/services are doing in the market and how the customers are responding to them. Thus, the can understand better where to invest their time and money.

With Big Data penetrations, you can always stay a step ahead of your competitors. You can screen the market to know what kind of promotions and offers your rivals are providing, and then you can come up with better offers for your customers. Also, Big Data insights allow you to learn customer behavior to understand the customer trends and provide a highly ‘personalized’ experience to them.

Who is Using Big Data?

The people who are using Big Data know better that, what is Big Data. Let’s look at some such industries:

IT Sector:

One of the highest users of Big Data, IT companies around the world are using Big Data to optimize their functioning, enhance employee productivity, and reduce risks in business operations. By combining Big Data technologies with ML and AI, the IT sector is continually powering innovation to get solutions even for the most challenging problems.

Healthcare Sector:

Big Data has now started to produce a significant difference in the healthcare sector. With the help of predictive analytics, medical professionals and HCPs are now able to provide personalized health care services to individual patients. Apart from that, fitness wearables, telemedicine, remote monitoring, all powered by Big Data and AI — are helping change lives for the better.

Education Sector:

Big Data is also serving to improve education today. Education is no more limited to the physical bounds of the classroom; there are various online educational courses to learn from. Academic institutions are investing in digital classes powered by Big Data technologies to help the all-round development of budding learners.

Banking Sector:

The banking sector relies on Big Data for fraud detection. Big Data tools can accurately identify fraudulent acts in real-time such as misuse of credit/debit cards, archival of examination records, faulty modification in customer stats, etc.

Manufacturing Sector:

The most notable benefit of Big Data in the building is increasing the supply strategies and product quality. In the manufacturing sector, Big data helps to form a transparent infrastructure, thereby, predicting possibilities and incompetencies that can affect the business adversely.

Palak Mazumdar

Written by

Broad experience across multiple industries including communications, media, publishing, entertainment, software, technology, financial services and energy.

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