Future Drivers of IT - ‘Tomorrow’s Enterprise & Big Data’
Parampreet Singh Baweja,
FMS, Delhi
“We make really great devices but actually if you think of our future, it’s in answering the question of how we put it all together and how we manage the data that’s coming out of these devices and encourage the innovation ecosystem for our platforms”–Young Sohn, Samsung
Hubble Telescope transmits about 120 gigabytes of science data every week. That's equal to about 1,097 meters of books on a shelf. Facebook has around 955 million users, with nearly half of them using it very actively. The sheer size of the data uploaded everyday boils down to 2.5 billion items shared, 2.7 billion likes, 300 million photographs uploaded and 500 terabyte data ingested into the system. The search giant Google processes over 1 billion search requests everyday and generates about 24 petabytes of data.
“Big Data” refers to such mammoth amounts of unstructured data produced by high-performance applications that fall in a wide and heterogeneous family of application scenarios: from social networks to scientific computing applications, from medical information systems to uranological applications, and so forth.
Data being processed in all these application scenarios have some specific characteristics which include: (i) large-scale data, which refers to the size and the distribution of data repositories; (ii) scalability issues, which refer to the robustness of these applications running on ‘Big Data’ repositories to scale over ever growing-in-size inputs rapidly; (iii) Requires Extraction-Transformation-Loading (ETL) processes to convert raw data to structured information; (iv) Requires design and development of easy interpretable analytics over ‘Big Data’ repositories to derive intelligence and extract useful knowledge.
But why think of ‘Big Data’ now? Is it really a thing to moot upon for today’s enterprises?
The case in point is the fact that fish can’t tell anything about water, because they swim in it. We come to know that technology has become pervasive when we don’t even notice it anymore. ‘Big Data’ has not yet woven into the fabric of life for today’s enterprises. Most of them think that it is just a marketing term coined by technological enthusiasts.
But the world is flat today and with a globalized world, enterprises always have to be on the cutting edge of technology to compete. Larger enterprises have economies of scale and they can thus use this to their advantage to wipe out smaller firms. So the future holds for bigger and larger firms which would work across boundaries and handle data for a much larger set of population. By investing in ‘Big Data’ analytics, complex procedures running over large-scale, enormous-in-size data repositories whose main goal is that of extracting useful knowledge kept in such repositories, enterprises are not only lowering costs of handling such huge chunks of data but are also better positioned to find meaningful patterns and hidden insights that help predict trends, prepare for future demands and take advantage of the new opportunities.