Big Data: Hype or Reality?

Big data simply means an amount of data so massive that it is difficult to handle by traditional methods. Interestingly it’s not the amount, volume of data that’s important but what organizations do with the data that matters. Big data provides insights t

Big data is currently bleeding edge technology, or something which technology professionals want to flaunt on their resume. Frankly speaking big data along with Internet of Things as of now is a sexy term to describe existing technologies that are ready for adoption, usage and would reach maturity. We would be looking at big data to understand whether big data is really big?

In order to understand whether big data is hype or reality we first need to understand in a layman’s term what is big data and when did it start trending. All folks who work in the technology industry are always insecure. And many a times folks who are not from the technology industry wonder about the insecurity of the technology industry folks. Frankly speaking this insecurity of the technology industry folks is due to the constant threat of getting obsolete (technologies dying down) and being laid off. There are many ways to explain the term big data. As per Wikipedia big data is a term for data sets that are so large 50 www.dqindia.com or complex that traditional data processing applications are inadequate. In layman terms big data simply means an amount of data so massive that it is difficult to handle by traditional methods. Interestingly it’s not the amount, volume of data that’s important but what organizations do with the data that matters. Now that we know what big data is let us go back to some history. Big data is not a recent phenomenon; it has been for quite some time without being named big data. In 2012, big data was a featured topic at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, with a report titled “Big Data, Big Impact.” The fact that big data had arrived was in 2012, when it became part of satire in the “Dilbert” comic strip by Scott Adams. “It comes from everywhere. It knows all.” one frame reads, and the next concludes that “its name is big data.”

Interestingly if you go through history and do some investigations the first time the word big data was brought up was the year 1998. The father of the term big data