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!