Big Data: Buzzword Or Technology Trend?

Big Data is often viewed as a big buzzword, but it’s a technology trend that is affecting everyone in their daily life – as well as changing the way enterprises need to organise their systems.

Ninety percent of all the data that exists in the world today was created in the past two years, according to analyst firm IDC. The average American office worker generates 5,000mb of data every day just by working on documents, sending emails, or downloading videos. By 2015 the amount of data we are creating now will have doubled – we are exponentially creating more and more data faster and faster.
You might think that these figures sound exaggerated. How could I have created thousands of megabytes of new data just by going into the office today? It’s easy with emails being copied and shared and presentations today requiring more images and more video – the enterprise has moved on from an era where text alone was enough.

The figures from IDC suggest that data creation will have grown by 2000% between now and 2020. And regular consumers create 75% of all this new data. This is because 87% of American adults constantly publish their location – often unknowingly – via their mobile phone and 65 billion location tagged payments are made in the US annually.

As more consumers carry more devices with the ability to measure and record more information, often automatically uploaded to the Internet, there is a sea of data being created and it affects every possible business and industry in every location.

Organisations in many industries are now facing pressure to explore Big Data, to find how they can get value from mining the information they have on clients and transactions, but it needs tools and expertise to get right.

This is one kind of enterprise project where it is almost certainly better to outsource the work to an expert than to try performing in house. You can buy some tools and make an attempt at examining the data you have, but if you don’t know how to configure those tools or where to start looking then your Big Data project might just turn out to be a big mistake.