Big Data and exploding amounts of data are becoming a serious problem. To stay in control, the information must scrutinized on the entire IT infrastructure. Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine (Peter Sondergaard, Senior VP, Gartner). The challenge to extract the raw information from vast amounts of data and processing it is one of the future key tasks for enterprises.
Big Data and Zettabyte
In 2010, the global digital universe for the first time broke the zettabyte barrier (1 with 21 zeros), in 2011, the amount of data produced worldwide increased to a total of 1.8 zettabytes that is 1.8 trillion gigabytes. Thus, the amount of information increased during the past five years by a factor of five. IBM says that we are currently producing daily 2.5 trillion bytes of data (1 with 18 zeros). 90 percent of the current global dataset have arisen in the past two years.
Big Data and the Increased the Flow of Data
Experts believe this trend is under the heading of big data. The concept of big data is new, but not the issue. By definition, big data is the part of applied science to understand a new dimension, which goes beyond the well-known procedures and methods of data analysis. Four trends are determined :
- Volume: The amount of the resulting information will continue to grow dramatically. Boundaries are not recognizable.
- Sources: In addition to the volume growth, the number of data sources is also increasing. While it was primarily transactional systems that produced the structured data, today a variety of other sources such as sensors, social networks and mobile devices added to this flow.
- Speed: In the future, ad hoc analysis and reporting are expected and demanded. Where previously a monthly report was sufficient, today there is a trend towards real-time analysis.
- User: With the growing volume of data grows, the number of users of data analysis in the business is increasing. The challenge is to provide the different roles with the appropriate evaluations.
Besides these four, a company must consider when handling data :
- Security: The multiple flows of information especially with regard to the growing number of mobile devices, which will be supplied with data require sophisticated security mechanisms.
- Quality: With the increasing amounts of data, it is becoming increasingly important for companies to ensure high quality. Even today, many companies are complained for a lack of quality, or at least has dubious quality of their data assets .