Hadoop in the Cloud

Grazed from MSPAlliance. Author: Kat McClure.

In a big-picture sense, the story of this decade’s tech is the story of decentralized computing: the vanishing of locational and structural constraints on the backbone of business infrastructure. The business world’s introduction to this concept came with the cloud, still a carefully delineated place away from the fabric of the business itself- the cloud for storage, the cloud for hosting. But what’s really changing the way we work these days is the integration of these technologies directly into the workflow, and nowhere is that more obvious than in the explosion of Hadoop.

Hadoop, if you’re unfamiliar, is the driver of big data- the inevitable consequence of our business, marketing and technological needs outpacing our ability to store and process massive chunks of data. Hadoop does this by decentralizing the data, creating a distributable, atomized method of storage and processing. Where traditional avenues of managing this data break down, from Excel to NumPy, there’s Hadoop…

It’s taken some time for the potential opportunities of this technology to even be mapped out, much less exploited. Marketing, research, finance, retail- every industry, every point on the business lifecycle can benefit a strong hand on its big data needs. But there’s a catch: Hadoop can be big and expensive, and to work flawlessly it needs a highly flexible, highly sophisticated environment- and provisioning for this can be just as costly…

Read more from the source @ https://www.mspalliance.com/blog/hadoop-cloud/