What Is The Big Data?

By Author: IvaluePlus
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WHAT IS BIG DATA

Big Data is a collection of data that is largely characterized by the following components:

• the large volume of data which exists
• the wide variety of data types
• the velocity at which much of the data is generated, collated, processed and disseminated
• the veracity, meaning the reliability or truthfulness of the data
• the value, or the worth of the information which can be attained by the processing and analysis of large datasets

Big data gives you new insights that open up new opportunities and business models. Getting started involves three key actions:

1. Integrate

Big data brings together data from many disparate sources and applications. Traditional data integration mechanisms, such as extract, transform, and load (ETL) generally aren’t up to the task. It requires new strategies and technologies to analyze big data sets at terabyte, or even petabyte, scale.
During integration, you need to bring in the data, process it, and make sure it’s formatted and available in a form that your business analysts can get started with.

2. ...
... Manage

Big data requires storage. Your storage solution can be in the cloud, on premises, or both. You can store your data in any form you want and bring your desired processing requirements and necessary process engines to those data sets on an on-demand basis. Many people choose their storage solution according to where their data is currently residing. The cloud is gradually gaining popularity because it supports your current compute requirements and enables you to spin up resources as needed.

3. Analyze

Your investment in big data pays off when you analyze and act on your data. Get new clarity with a visual analysis of your varied data sets. Explore the data further to make new discoveries. Share your findings with others. Build data models with machine learning and artificial intelligence. Put your data to work.

BIG DATA BEST PRACTICES

1. Align big data with specific business goals
More extensive data sets enable you to make new discoveries. To that end, it is important to base new investments in skills, organization, or infrastructure with a strong business-driven context to guarantee ongoing project investments and funding. To determine if you are on the right track, ask how big data supports and enables your top business and IT priorities. Examples include understanding how to filter web logs to understand ecommerce behaviour, deriving sentiment from social media and customer support interactions, and understanding statistical correlation methods and their relevance for customer, product, manufacturing, and engineering data.

2. Ease skills shortage with standards and governance
One of the biggest obstacles to benefiting from your investment in big data is a skills shortage. You can mitigate this risk by ensuring that big data technologies, considerations, and decisions are added to your IT governance program. Standardizing your approach will allow you to manage costs and leverage resources. Organizations implementing big data solutions and strategies should assess their skill requirements early and often and should proactively identify any potential skill gaps. These can be addressed by training/cross-training existing resources, hiring new resources, and leveraging consulting firms.

3. Optimize knowledge transfer with a centre of excellence
Use a centre of excellence approach to share knowledge, control oversight, and manage project communications. Whether big data is a new or expanding investment, the soft and hard costs can be shared across the enterprise. Leveraging this approach can help increase big data capabilities and overall information architecture maturity in a more structured and systematic way.

4. Top payoff is aligning unstructured with structured data
It is certainly valuable to analyse big data on its own. But you can bring even greater business insights by connecting and integrating low density big data with the structured data you are already using today.
Whether you are capturing customer, product, equipment, or environmental big data, the goal is to add more relevant data points to your core master and analytical summaries, leading to better conclusions. For example, there is a difference in distinguishing all customer sentiment from that of only your best customers. Which is why many see big data as an integral extension of their existing business intelligence capabilities, data warehousing platform, and information architecture.
Keep in mind that the big data analytical processes and models can be both human- and machine-based. Big data analytical capabilities include statistics, spatial analysis, semantics, interactive discovery, and visualization. Using analytical models, you can correlate different types and sources of data to make associations and meaningful discoveries.

5. Align with the cloud operating model
Big data processes and users require access to a broad array of resources for both iterative experimentation and running production jobs. A big data solution includes all data realms including transactions, master data, reference data, and summarized data. Analytical sandboxes should be created on demand. Resource management is critical to ensure control of the entire data flow including pre- and post-processing, integration, in-database summarization, and analytical modelling. A well-planned private and public cloud provisioning and security strategy plays an integral role in supporting these changing requirements.

References: https://www.oracle.com/in/big-data/what-is-big-data/#how