Hello all,
Off-late we have all been going through a lot of articles related to big data. There is so much of confusion on what exactly the term stands for and its implications. So, here I am trying to give a brief insight into the big data conundrum. I have tried to keep it as non-technical as possible being the first post related to the series of posts I will be writing in the coming weeks.
The below article contains its references from The Hindu article and from the following URL:
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/the-big-data-conundrum/article7224734.ece?homepage=true
I have taken important points from the above article and tried to summarize it with a brief consolidation.
BIG:
Why is Facebook developing solar-powered drones to beam Internet from the sky? And why do both Facebook and Gmail keep requesting you for your cell phone number? What is the need for something called internet.org when there is already an Internet ?
The answer to all these questions is a single term: BIG DATA
Big Data is nothing less than a pot of treasure. It is the heart of Information Technology in the same way as land is to a farmer. Big data in combination with Internet of Things (IOT) promises a future where all important decisions about business, life, and society would be taken purely on the basis of data. Human judgment, which is typically conflicted and often distorted by factors such as morals , emotions and ethics need never come into the picture. This, would make for greater efficiency, higher productivity, and the optimal utilization of resources for the greatest good. This decision making, usually called the evidence based decision making is driven purely by the big data analytics. The next things that comes is the actionable information. Evidence based decision making does pay off in business operations. It is ideal for every industry be it weather prediction, disaster management, or finding the right talent for sports, teams etc.
In other words, we no longer need to think. Collect data, feed them into the maw of analytics, and wait for solutions to emerge. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. The WE Forum, an annual gathering of the global power elite, notes in its Global Technology report that data is a new form of asset class. According to the statistics, with the number of app downloads growing from 10 billion in 2010 to 77 billion in 2014, there is “a $19 trillion global opportunity to create value over the next decade.
Where is big data taking us:
The exponential growth of big data analytics, and its increasing utilization policies, is premised on many things, including growth in IT infrastructure, the digital inclusion of those hitherto excluded by poverty.
But what it needs above all is the erasure of the very concept of privacy. Many of us have already voluntarily surrendered our privacy, either for the sake of convenience or to save costs — by ticking the ‘I accept’ box when we sign on to a social media or email service.
But privacy — while critical for a functional democracy – is not the only casualty of big data. The serious threat is a digital replay of colonial era exploitation, with data replacing mineral resources and raw materials as the source of value. It is in the context of such anomalies that a term becomes relevant: data colonialism.
The bigger logic of big data:
Typically, the ‘big’ of big data is a reference to the sheer volume, velocity and variety of the datasets involved. But perhaps the real reason why ‘big’ data is big is that it tries to appropriate human agency and transfer it to data and algorithms.
Even the term ‘actionable information’, often invoked in the context of big data, suggests that it is not humans who have to decide what is to be done, and therefore take responsibility for the choices being made, but somehow the data or information itself which decides the action to be taken. This, finally, is the inescapable social cost of big data analytics.
And so, finally, we come to the big question about big data: Can analytics find solutions to humanity’s problems? Yes, but not to the problems that human beings choose not to address.Many global problems have their origins in deprivation. We don’t need big data analytics to tell us this.
In fact, there already is ample data, which confirms that reducing inequality boosts economic growth. But this has hardly prompted a corresponding change in government policies anywhere. For, as data evangelists never tire of pointing out, big data is no different from gold — it is firstly, and ultimately, a commodity.
Opportunities and Limitations:
Big Data, to keep in simple terms is nothing but large amounts of data. The growth of it will provide opportunities as well as pose limitations to the technical world in the coming years. The most important thing for every one wanting to get into or have already have gotten into big data prospects is that they should be able to differentiate and find out a way so that it helps in developing the business or provide a solution to a subjective problem. People should not risk being flooded with the huge data. It is more important to know what you are going to do with that data rather than how much data you are going to collect and harvest. The concept of big data is still in infancy stages for many organisations, so the security of the data and getting an overall monitoring schema of the data are quite important more than anything else. New models for the development, like say the data life-cycle are needed to be implemented. Along with these there is a definite need to improve the storage infrastructure for the incoming data. Organisations must either make sure that the storage is scalable or have to go the cloud service providers. The cloud providers of storage will provide enhanced security to the data. One such provider is the Amazon web services. The AWS S3( Simple Storage Service) is one such scalable storage provider for storing the data for organisations. It is simple, scalable and secure.
Major opportunities of Big Data : Mike, CSO, co-founder of Cloudera states that the amounts of data that is generated this year is as much as the data generated in the last ten years. Such is the willingness of people/customers in providing the data. So, by using these large sets of data, we can redevelop our products to suit the customers intended, provide better safety measures for the data, better risk management, website customization according to the current scenario, identifying new revenue areas for the market, reducing the maintenance costs, and finally improving the human lifestyle by providing better and smarter results. All these topics and the technical specifications of each of these advantages will be discussed in detail soon.
The following video gives a good insight into the Big data. Though a little technical it makes a good watch. Hope you like it. And thanks for reading the post. I will come up with a more technical write-up in the next blog post.