Big data in the cloud – where next?
July 3, 2015
Grazed from InformationAge. Author: Ben Rossi.
Big data is to the information age what the steam engine was to the industrial revolution. From expanding user intelligence to improving operational efficiencies, big data has revolutionised market places. IDC predicts that by 2020 we will create 44 zettabytes, or 44 trillion gigabytes, of data annually. To transform big data into information that drives business value it needs to be analysed. Unsurprisingly, crunching big data requires seriously big compute and a solid infrastructure to support it.
The data boom
Our insatiable desire for data insights did not begin with big data. If we look back to the 90s tech boom, business intelligence (BI) tools were the new big thing. BI allowed organisations to report and analyse company data, but unfortunately these systems were confined to dedicated data warehouses running specialist servers. As a result, conducting BI was too expensive and technical for the majority of enterprises.