| Big Data

What is Big Data?

Big Data is the next wave of transformative technology, and it’s changing the way companies of all sizes and in all industries do business. In its most elemental form, Big Data is massive collections of unstructured and loosely-structured data sets too complex to be analyzed using traditional methods. And it’s growing constantly.

90% of all data in the world today was created within the last two years. Big Data sets come from everywhere: mobile phones, social networking sites, global positioning satellites, RFID’s, digital photos, and purchase transaction records. Each new data source presents new opportunities to learn and merge with existing data. Many companies have learned how to capture these data sets, but very few have learned how to use them effectively.

What Opportunities does Big Data bring?

Hidden inside data and metadata are insights into customer behavior, market trends, and new revenue streams. Each transaction, each phone call, and each sensor record can take you one step closer to finding inefficiencies or identifying opportunities. That understanding leads to informed and better decision making, and allows companies to answer questions they couldn’t answer before.

Big Data isn’t just about the size of the data sets – it’s about the incredible potential to make a company more agile, responsive, and accurate. Companies with successful data governance practices are more profitable.

What Problems does Big Data bring?

Big Data is messy. It’s unstructured, requires cleansing, verification, and reconciliation. It can consist of text documents stored on servers, blogs, location data, and thousands of other sources. Organizing those into one cohesive and meaningful model is not an easy task.

The problems with Big Data can be summarized into the 3 V’s: volume, velocity, and variety. Big Data keeps growing in massive amounts every day, comes faster, and continually comes from new places. Are you properly equipped to handle it?

How can ITG can help you capitalize on those opportunities?

Islington Technology Group has resources with Big Data experience. We know what it takes to confidently guide clients to better Big Data management practices and to answer the key questions:

How do I extract insights and value from Big Data?
How do I manage data privacy?
How do I get the right data to the right person at the right time?
How do I process the data quickly enough to get timely market insights?
What should my data governance policy be?

“…big data will once again become ‘just data’ by 2020 and architectural approaches, infrastructure and hardware/software that does not adapt to this ‘new normal’ will be retired. Organizations resisting this change will suffer severe economic impacts.”

Gartner

“From the dawn of civilization until 2003, humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days … and the pace is accelerating.”

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.”

Daniel Keys Moran

“…the common language of business is not going to be Chinese or Spanish. It’s going to be math.”

Michael Rhodin, IBM

“How much value can I extract from a byte of data? How much does it cost to store? If we take the ratio, we want it to be bigger than one or else we discard. Of course this isn’t the whole story. There’s also a big data economic law, which states that no individual record is particularly valuable, but having every record is incredibly valuable.”

Josh Wills, Cloudera

“Big data is more than an opportunity to do better. It should reset our expectations to see that great things are possible.”

Joseph F. Coughlin, MIT

“We’ve got lots of dirt — data. And there’s definitely gold in our data. But to refine it into information, you need people that have been doing this for years.”

Rob Lux, Freddie Mac