Big Data: a simple introduction
We might’ve been hearing the term Big Data a lot nowadays. But do we know what is big data? It is actually just as the name states, some extremely large data sets. It’s mostly the data that are gathered from various sources on the internet and then used by various organizations to analyze different information related to their business or cause. And there’s a huge amount of data that’s being collected every day. But actually, it’s not the amount of data that’s important about big data. All that data, that we’re calling as Big data, is actually used to analyze some patterns, trends, surveys etc. It’s analyzed mostly for gathering insights which lead to better decisions and tactics for the organizations. You might have wondered how the websites know just which advertisements to show or how Google knows what is trending now or how google image search works, right? Well, it’s big data!
The term big data is not that old but the information gathering and storing has been going on for quite a long time. And it has been building up slowly. The term was first used in an IEEE publication in 1997 which was about the challenges of working with a big amount of information such as 100 gigabytes.
But now as more and more people are getting involved with the internet, the amount of data has been increasing by the minute. As a result, the researchers and companies are able to analyze these data to identify the needs of people and are able to provide services accordingly.
But while big data is very useful to the organizations, only a limited percentage of the organizations use it. According to a survey, most organizations don’t even know enough about big data or don’t understand the benefits of big data for their organizations. But the good news is, the organizations are slowly starting to realize the importance of big data and are starting to use it.
On the other hand, there is a large part of users who actually do not understand big data well enough or don’t even have a clue about it. Which is not a piece of good news, since the use of big data has been growing rapidly and it will have a big impact on society. And also this technology actually affects our privacy.
The amount of data that has been collected and analyzed could actually have the power to be analyzed and then provide so much information about people that could be even more than people know about themselves. Which is actually very scary. There might be insights about us, information or analysis about us that might not be risky or anything, but we still might not want others to know about it. And that’s where data security and awareness comes. While we might unknowingly or knowingly without realizing, giving away our data to the companies, the companies need to be upfront and clear about the data they are collecting.
Also, there’s the issue of data security. If the data are stored in storage mediums or cloud-based storage that can only hold static data, then the dynamic data, that are continuously being collected as big data cannot be secured by the regular security check. Then there’s always the risk of the data being stolen! So the organizations need to make sure that the data being collected are immune to security threats. They should also make sure that the data cannot be stolen.
People are actually hyped about big data because it enables retailers to make tactics according to the need of the consumers, helps in surveys and in productivity. On the other hand, the big data is behind the ease of understanding of the image and speech on the internet. When something is being searched on a search engine, for example, an image of something, the search engine looks for the images that are labeled with the name of that image and so the more data there is, the better experience the user would eventually get. That’s how we can, for example, search a picture of a cat or a flower or something and mostly we get the accurate results for that. It’s amazing, right?
And then there’s the new beginning of the age of analytics. There’s going to be a huge demand for data analyzers and data-security experts. The growing dependency on big data will create a lot of opportunities for CS graduates in the future. It may also get opportunities for new tech-savvy companies to make themselves among the high-impact companies in the world.
So all in all, the big data being as vast as the name, is something challenging yet very important for the age of analytics. Getting to know about it more and learning to use it for when needed is indeed very important for us.
