From how much quantity of food we consume, to how many pages can we read per day can be visualized through big data.
Every single day over 2.5 Quintillion bytes of data is generated. 2.5 Quintillion equals to 2,500,000,000,000,000,000. We have to read twice or thrice to check the zero’s in the quintillion, so how can we make sense of so much data? How can we use big data in our everyday life? To understand this, let’s have a basic idea of big data.
If we gather all the data from the beginning of time until the year 2020, it will be less than we now create in a minute. This phenomenon is changing our understanding of the world and our place in it. It is known as big data. Big data could be a window into the lives of customers that we have never imagined previously.
But, yes as the name suggests, big data are really big and crowded, it comes from so many sources in so many different forms. So Big data and analytics are all about unraveling these strands of data, picking out the relevant part, accessing it, and transforming these data into knowledge.
Big data contains two different kinds of information: Structured and unstructured data.
Structured data are the ones that have already been stored and managed in the databases. These kinds of data are easy to digest and decipher. Here the meaning of each data item is defined.
Unstructured data’s are unorganized data, unlike structured one. This data requires an appropriate storage system, it needs to be analyzed to be useful.
Gone are the times where we use to look at the small data and think how we can make sense out of it, now we have a lot more of it, more than we ever could imagine. When we have a large body of data, we can fundamentally do things that we couldn’t do when we only had a smaller amount. With the effective use of big data the data has gone from a stock to a flow, from stationary to static, from fluid to dynamic.
The highlighted characteristics of winning companies in the big data era are the ability to capture and analyze the wealth of information available and the ability to convert into actionable insights.
Big data is proving its effectiveness in various fields, it can improve the quality of patients and the management in the health care sector, it enables retailers to optimize the prize, personalize the recommendations and deliver unique customer experience, helps banks detect fraud at the speed of light, and reduce the lead time in manufacturing sectors. Big data will be everywhere soon.
