What is Big Data & why is Big

Data important in today’s era

Big data is a term that describes the large volume of data — both structured
and unstructured — that inundates a business on a day-to-day basis. But it’s
not the amount of data that’s important. It’s what organizations do with the
data that matters. Big data can be analyzed for insights that lead to better
decisions and strategic business moves.

Still not sure what Big Data is? The IT industry, in an attempt to quantify what
is and isn’t Big Data, has come up with what are known as the “V’s” of Big Data.
The foundational three are:

 Volume: The amount of data is immense. According to sources each

day 2.3 trillion gigabytes of new data is being created.

 Velocity: The speed of data and processing (analysis of streaming data

to produce near or real time results)

 Variety: The different types of data, structured, as well as,

unstructured.
The concept of big data has been around for years, most organizations now
understand that if they capture all the data that streams into their businesses,
they can apply analytics and get significant value from it.

When a company has TBs data of every month so its necessary for them to
analyze that data and get desired results from it, but working on such a huge
amount of data is not possible with ordinary tools however if some how you get
to work on those simple tools it would take days to get accurate results. Thats
why Big data tools are used to handle that data and get accurate results in a
short period of time.

Definition of Big Data according to different Sources :

According to Gartner:

Big data is high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets

that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for
enhanced insight and decision making.

From Wikipedia:

Big Data is a broad term for data sets so large or complex that they are
difficult to process using traditional data processing applications. Challenges
include analysis, capture, curation, search, sharing, storage, transfer,
visualization, and information privacy.

In Big Data, a Revolution, authors Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth

Cukier, offer no rigorous definition of Big Data, but offer insight as to why the
size does matter, and what it can be used for:

“The ability of society to harness information in novel ways to produce useful

insights or goods and services of significant value” and “…things one can do
at a large scale that cannot be done at a smaller one, to extract new insights
or create new forms of value.”
Importance of Big Data :

The Big Data analytics is indeed a revolution in the field of Information

Technology. The use of Data analytics by the companies is enhancing every
year.Big data has the characteristics of high variety, volume, and velocity.Big
Data involves the use of analytics techniques like machine learning, data
mining, natural language processing, and statistics. With the help of big data
multiple operations can be performed at a single platform. You can store Tbs of
data, pre process it , analyze the data and visualize the data with the help of
couple of big data tools.

Data is extracted, prepared and blended to provide analysis for the businesses.
Large enterprises and multinational organizations use these techniques widely
these days in different ways.
Big data analytics helps organizations to work with their data efficiently and
use that data identify new oportunities. Different technqiues and algorithms
can be applied to predict from data. Mutliple business strategies can be applied
for future success of the company and that leads to smarter business moves,
more efficient operations and higher profits.

Following are the three main reasons that why Big data is so important and
efficient.

Cost reduction. Big data technologies such as Hadoop and cloud-based

analytics bring significant cost advantages when it comes to storing large
amounts of data

Faster, better decision making. With the speed of Hadoop and in-memory

analytics, combined with the ability to analyze new sources of data, businesses
are able to analyze information immediately and make decisions based on what
they’ve learned.

New products and services. With the ability to gauge customer needs and
satisfaction through analytics comes the power to give customers what they
want.

Real-time Benefits of Big Data Analytics:

The use of Big Data analytics is very flexible to another fields as well. With the
use of big data alot there has been an enormous growth in multiple industries.
Some of them are

 Banking

 Technology

 Consumer

 Manufacturing
Specially in Banking sector, big data tools have been associated with their
system. Multiple operations can be performed on transactional data moreover
tools like Apache Hive facilitate users to query on their data to get results in a
very short period of time. A user can optimize the query engine to get better
query performance.

The usability of big data is also increased in educational sector. There are new
options for research and analysis using data analytics.The insights provided by
the big data analytics tools help in knowing the needs of customers better.

Job Opportunities and Big Data Analytics:

With huge interest and investment in the Big Data technologies, the
professionals carrying the skills of big data analytics are in huge demand.
Fields like Data Analytics and Data Engineering have the most worth now a
days. IT Executives , Business Analysts and Software developers are learning
big data tools & techniques to grow with the market of jobs & opportunities
since some of the big data tools are based on Python and Java so it is easier for
the programmers who already working on these languages moreover users who
know how to pre-process and has skills like data cleaning, can easily learn
about Big Data analyzation tools and analytics. With the help of visualization
tools like Power Bi, Qlikview, Tableau etc , a user can easily analyze the data
and present a new marketing strategy.

In different domains of industry, the nature of the job differs and so does the
requirement of the industry. Since analytics is the emerging in every field, the
workforce needs are equally enormous. The job titles may include Big Data
Analyst, Big Data Engineer, Business Intelligence Consultants, Solution
Architect, etc.

Big Data Applications

The primary goal of Big Data applications is to help companies make more informative business
decisions by analyzing large volumes of data. It could include web server logs, Internet click stream
data, social media content and activity reports, text from customer emails, mobile phone call details
and machine data captured by multiple sensors.

Organisations from different domain are investing in Big Data applications, for examining large data
sets to uncover all hidden patterns, unknown correlations, market trends, customer preferences and
other useful business information. In this blog we will we be covering:

 Big Data Applications in Healthcare

 Big Data Applications in Manufacturing
 Big Data Applications in Media & Entertainment
 Big Data Applications in IoT 
 Big Data Applications in Government

Let’s understand how Big Data applications are playing a major role in different domains.

Big Data Applications: Healthcare

The level of data generated within healthcare systems is not trivial. Traditionally, the health care
industry lagged in using Big Data, because of limited ability to standardize and consolidate data.

But now Big data analytics have improved healthcare by providing personalized medicine and
prescriptive analytics. Researchers are mining the data to see what treatments are more effective for
particular conditions, identify patterns related to drug side effects, and gains other important
information that can help patients and reduce costs.
With the added adoption of mHealth, eHealth and wearable technologies the volume of data is
increasing at an exponential rate. This includes electronic health record data, imaging data, patient
generated data, sensor data, and other forms of data.

By mapping healthcare data with geographical data sets, it’s possible to predict disease that will
escalate in specific areas. Based of predictions, it’s easier to strategize diagnostics and plan for
stocking serums and vaccines.

Big Data Applications: Manufacturing

Predictive manufacturing provides near-zero downtime and transparency. It requires an enormous
amount of data and advanced prediction tools for a systematic process of data into useful information.
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Major benefits of using Big Data applications in manufacturing industry are:

 Product quality and defects tracking

 Supply planning
 Manufacturing process defect tracking
 Output forecasting
 Increasing energy efficiency
 Testing and simulation of new manufacturing processes
 Support for mass-customization of manufacturing
Big Data Applications: Media & Entertainment
Various companies in the media and entertainment industry are facing new business models, for the
way they –  create, market and distribute their content. This is happening because of
current consumer’s search and the requirement of accessing content anywhere, any time, on any
device.

Big Data provides actionable points of information about millions of individuals. Now, publishing
environments are tailoring advertisements and content to appeal consumers. These insights are
gathered through various data-mining activities. Big Data applications benefits media and
entertainment industry by:

 Predicting what the audience wants

 Scheduling optimization
 Increasing acquisition and retention
 Ad targeting
 Content monetization and new product development
Big Data Applications: Internet of Things (IoT)
Data extracted from IoT devices provides a mapping of device inter-connectivity. Such mappings
have been used by various companies and governments to increase efficiency. IoT is also
increasingly adopted as a means of gathering sensory data, and this sensory data is used in
medical and manufacturing contexts. 
Big Data Applications: Government
The use and adoption of Big Data within governmental processes allows efficiencies in terms of cost,
productivity, and innovation. In government use cases, the same data sets are often applied across
multiple applications & it requires multiple departments to work in collaboration.

Big Data Training

Since Government majorly acts in all the domains, thus it plays an important role in innovating Big
Data applications in each and every domain. Let me address some of the major areas:

Cyber security & Intelligence

The federal government launched a cyber security research and development plan that relies on the
ability to analyze large data sets in order to improve the security of U.S. computer networks.
The National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is creating a “Map of the World” that can gather and
analyze data from a wide variety of sources such as satellite and social media data. It contains a
variety of data from classified, unclassified, and top-secret networks.

Crime Prediction and Prevention

Police departments can leverage advanced, real-time analytics to provide actionable intelligence that
can be used to understand criminal behaviour, identify crime/incident patterns, and uncover location-
based threats.

Pharmaceutical Drug Evaluation

According to a McKinsey report, Big Data technologies could reduce research and development costs
for pharmaceutical makers by $40 billion to $70 billion. The FDA and NIH use Big Data technologies
to access large amounts of data to evaluate drugs and treatment.

Scientific Research
The National Science Foundation has initiated a long-term plan to:

 Implement new methods for deriving knowledge from data

 Develop new approaches to education
 Create a new infrastructure to “manage, curate, and serve data to communities”.

Weather Forecasting
The NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) gathers data every minute of every
day from land, sea, and space-based sensors. Daily NOAA uses Big Data to analyze and extract
value from over 20 terabytes of data.

Tax Compliance
Big Data Applications can be used by tax organizations to analyze both unstructured and structured
data from a variety of sources in order to identify suspicious behavior and multiple identities. This
would help in tax fraud identification.

Traffic Optimization
Big Data helps in aggregating real-time traffic data gathered from road sensors, GPS devices and
video cameras. The potential traffic problems in dense areas can be prevented by adjusting public
transportation routes in real time.