Big Data

Big data is a term that describes large, hard-to-manage volumes of data – both structured and unstructured – that inundate businesses on a day-to-day basis. But it’s not just the type or amount of data that’s important, it’s what organizations do with the data that matters. It can be analyzed for insights that improve decisions and give confidence for making strategic business moves.The term big data has been in use since the 1990s, with some giving credit to John Mashey for popularizing the term. It usually includes data sets with sizes beyond the ability of commonly used software tools to capture, curate, manage, and process data within a tolerable elapsed time. Big data philosophy encompasses unstructured, semi-structured and structured data, however the main focus is on unstructured data.It requires a set of techniques and technologies with new forms of integration to reveal insights from data-sets that are diverse, complex, and of a massive scale.