First Stop-Over: Big Data can make us live longer and better

According to an Accenture study, when preparing to make strategic decisions only 21% of UK and US company professionals rely on complex data analysis while a great majority still considers a mix of high-level statistics and “gut feeling” a better alternative.

When mentioning Big Data, the general perception is that structured, integrated, reliable and accessible data processing is far from become reality.

But why so much resistance? Big Data is a good… mainly because it’s Big.  It’s actually astonishingly huge and with lots and lots of Terabytes and Petabytes of unused and mostly unstructured raw information which correctly managed could revolutionize pretty much any life context!

A few years ago I attended a meeting held by my pharmaceutical company’s headquarters in NY.  For privacy reasons I cannot fully disclose its name but suffice to say that they created one of the most famous diamond blue pills in history that revolutionized the quality of life of a consistent number of men (and women). In that occasion they mentioned a few new ideas that were on the plate for the future of healthcare, the main one being how to start exploiting the potential of Big Data. The idea was to eventually reach a world where most of the population’s genetic and historical family disease track record could be stored and accessible, allowing to predict potential or future illnesses and shifting the focus of healthcare from curing diseases to preventing them. This project was founded on the common assumption in the bioinformatics community that in the last years, more scientific data has been generated than in the entire history of mankind.

Call it predictive analytics, statistical tools or algorithms, healthcare companies are understanding that without Big Data analysis, detecting the causes of diseases, targeting drug candidates and running more efficient clinical trials cannot not be fully achieved.
Thorough analysis on clinical and genetic Big Data can serve pretty much any purpose. For example predicting the probability of success of the hugely expensive and easily fallible clinical trials. Leading the companies to invest on projects that have more success potential or that better target certain patients does not only translate into higher profits for the firms but mainly to more and better drugs being approved for us!
"Combining larger datasets on drug response with genomic data on patients could steer therapies to the people they are most likely to help. This could substantially reduce the need for trial-and-error medicine, with all its discomforts, high costs and sometimes tragically wrong guesses.” (Kaufmann Foundation)
Does getting rid of AIDS or Alzheimer's disease sound good to you? Who would have thought that together with reinforcing their R&D or open innovation pooling departments, pharmaceutical companies would also explore the future and potential of Big Data?

However, no matter how much better our life could become thanks to this new technological frontier, the eternal question of how to prevent security issues that the leakage of such sensitive personal information could cause should always be out there. If in the wrong hands or if of low-veracity, this data may be manipulated to push unnecessary but profitable treatments as well as provide the incorrect medical solutions to specific diagnoses.

A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Big Data Universe

Hello and Welcome to our Exploring Big Data blog!

We are a team of International MBA students from IE Business School in Madrid, Spain and we will be using this blog as a journal of sorts as we learn about and explore the concept and potential of big data to truly change the way the world works.

To be honest, we aren't the experts (yet!) - we are just starting out and learning about this concept which has so quickly become a business "buzzword" in the past year. As I started to research big data...I came across the term "zettabyte" for the very first time (If you are wondering...it's 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes or four steps up from a gigabyte!). But far from being a bad thing, we think that this is a good thing and that you, like the majority of people out there, have a lot to learn and can join us on this learning journey as we explore this innovative and game-changing new technology.

So let's get started!

So what is 'Big Data'?

Big data gets its start from a rather obvious source, the explosion of the digitized and connected world. More and more, everything that we do is online and is saved or recorded in some kind of format. This information (forms or surveys filled out, internet searches, Wal-Mart purchases, facebook profiles, blogs, paper forms filled out, YouTube videos, scanned books, personal photos uploaded, etc etc etc!) is being collected in databases by a wide variety of organizations and companies - creating a truly massive amount of raw data. 

This concept of "big data" itself lies not in these huge amounts of raw data, but in the process of analyzing this data and finding trends which are actionable. Analyzing these volumes of data is not easy - in fact, big data is defined specifically as "requir(ing) exceptional technologies to efficiently process large quantities of data within tolerable elapsed times."

Extremely large amounts of raw, often unstructured data are being collected and need to be analyzed.

What makes Big Data so relevant and gives it so much potential is how companies and organizations are using these vast quantities of data to inform both their day-to-day actions and their long-term strategies. But this will be something to explore further in future blog posts!

Also, for all you visual learners out there, we thought a cool infographic on some of the truly mid-boggling numbers behind big data would be useful and might just get you hooked for what is to come. This infographic was created by the good people at Asigra. One thing that jumped out at me most - 90% of the world's existing data has been created in the past 2 years!

What is Big Data? infographic

What's Next?

We hope that this introduction to the topic has helped you to understand a little bit better what exactly "Big Data" is and how it is rapidly becoming such an important technology. In the weeks ahead we will be exploring true nature of the technology behind big data, the various industry applications, the value proposition to businesses, truly innovative and ground-breaking uses of big data, the challenges and risks associated with this technology and plenty of other surprises.

Please join us and check in regularly to learn a little more about 'big data' and it's applications. Check back often as there will be regular updates and lots to learn!