Big Data For Dummies
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As you enter the world of big data, you'll need to absorb many new types of database and data-management technologies. Here are the top-ten big data trends:

  • Hadoop is becoming the underpinning for distributed big data management. Hadoop is a distributed file system that can be used in conjunction with MapReduce to process and analyze massive amounts of data, enabling the big data trend. Hadoop will be tightly integrated into data warehousing technologies so that structured and unstructured data can be integrated more effectively.

  • Big data makes it possible to leverage data from sensors to change business outcomes. More and more businesses are using highly sophisticated sensors on the equipment that runs their operations. New innovations in big data technology are making it possible to analyze all this data to get advanced notification of problems that can be fixed to protect the business.

  • Big data can help a business initiative become a real-time action to increase revenue. Companies in markets such as retail are using real-time streaming data analytics to keep track of customer actions and offer incentives to increase revenue per customer.

  • Big data can be integrated with historical data warehouses to transform planning. Big data can provide a company with a better understanding of massive amounts of data about their business. This information about the current state of the business can be combined with historical data to get a full view of the context for business change.

  • Big data can change the way diseases are managed by adding predictive analytics. Increasingly, healthcare practitioners are looking to big data solutions to gain insights into disease by compare symptoms and test results to databases of results from hundreds of thousands of other cases. This allows practitioners to more quickly predict outcomes and save lives.

  • Cloud computing will transform the way that data will be managed in the future. Cloud computing is invaluable as a tool to support the expansion of big data. Increasingly, cloud services that are optimized for data will mean that many more services and delivery models will make big data more practical for companies of all sizes.

  • Security and governance will be the difference between success and failure of businesses leveraging big data. Big data can be a huge benefit, but it isn't risk-free. Companies will discover that if they are not careful, it is possible to expose private information through big data analysis. Companies need to balance the need to analyze results with best practices for security and governance.

  • Veracity, or truthfulness, of big data will become the most important issue for the coming year. Many companies can get carried away with the ability to analyze massive amounts of data and get back compelling results that predict business outcomes. Therefore, companies will find that the truthfulness of the data must become a top priority or decision making will suffer.

  • As big data moves out of the experimental stage, more packaged offerings will be developed. Most big data projects initiated over the past few years have been experimental. Companies are cautiously working with new tools and technology. Now big data is about to enter the mainstream. Lots of packaged big data offerings will flood the market.

  • Use cases and new innovative ways to apply big data will explode. Early successes with big data in different industries such as manufacturing, retail, and healthcare will lead to many more industries looking at ways to leverage massive amounts of data to transform their industries.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Judith Hurwitz is an expert in cloud computing, information management, and business strategy. Alan Nugent has extensive experience in cloud-based big data solutions. Dr. Fern Halper specializes in big data and analytics. Marcia Kaufman specializes in cloud infrastructure, information management, and analytics.

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