Big Data – Its Importance and How It Affects our Everyday Lives

Did you know that 90% of the data in the whole world today has just been created as of 2012?  It has been stated that each day, we create about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data! You may be thinking, where did all this data come from?  This data actually comes from many sources including but not limited to: sensors utilized to collect climate information, digital pictures and videos, software logs, mobile phone GPS signals, purchase transaction records, and let’s not forget, posts to social media sites.  All of this is known as big data.

Big data is described as a collection of data sets so huge and complex that it becomes hard to process with the use of conventional data processing applications or on-hand database management tools.

Below are some ways how big data is important and how it affects our everyday lives:

• Some companies tend to leverage big data in order to improve their existing procedures and processes.

Science and research companies – The decoding of the human genome originally took 10 years to process in the past, but now it can be achieved in just 1 week!

Financial services companies – since these companies already execute fraud analysis, they can utilize big data from other sources, thus improving the process and even identify potential issues much faster than ever before.

Police and other law enforcement agencies – big data technology aids law enforcement personnel to analyze streaming video footages in real time and specifically point out smaller chunks of video relevant for review, rather than relying on human eyes to look at each and every frame.

• Big data technology tremendously helps companies or organizations to do something utterly special and/or unorthodox, offering “fresh, out-of-the-box marketing opportunities” from already-existing, previously untapped data.  This can happen in a variety of methods, depending on the choices made by the company/organization such as: they can turn their information into an advantage that enables them to partner with other companies/organizations, or they can even create an add-on product either for their new or existing customers.

Telecommunication companies – with big data technology, they can now analyze location data that is garnered from mobile devices. This data not only aids in improving their own networks and other processes, but also it can help open up opportunities for partnering with retailers.

Marketing and sales companies – in the world of marketing and selling products and/or services, there are many companies that employ hundreds or even thousands of individuals to do just one “simple yet complex” thing, and that is, to partake in pricing decisions.  What makes pricing very complex and difficult is due to the fact that it involves many people in highly-complicated negotiations with customers juggling countless promotions and discounts.  You may notice that salesperson A may be a power seller, but he may be selling huge volumes of products at a loss.  On the other hand, salesperson B may sell lower volumes of products, but at prices that are certain to reap better profits.  By means of [tp lang=”en” only=”y”]leveraging big data for price improvement[/tp][tp not_in=”en”]leveraging big data for price improvement[/tp], these marketing companies become extremely adept at making the most accurate and precise comparisons on how salespeople are pricing products and services, as well as evaluating their performance at work. This results to a more comprehensible assessment of a person’s contributions to boosting up the profit performance of their company.

• Big data technology aids in making transactions and other forms of simple processing methods much faster, such as those existing in physical stores and even online stores.

Did you know that Amazon.com alone handles thousands of queries from more than 1 million customers and 500,000 third-party sellers alike, as well as millions of back-end operations per day?  The big data technology that keeps Amazon running smoothly is actually Linux based, and since 2005, they hold the world’s biggest Linux databases, with capacities of 24.7 TB, 18.5 TB, the lowest being 7.8 TB!

Closing Thoughts

No matter how you look at it, big data basically is just a matter of size.  It is something that aids in making one’s business more agile and flexible, it helps in finding insights regarding new and emerging kinds of data and content, and it helps in making processes more efficient and faster than ever before – to the point that every bit of data is processed and analyzed in “real time”.

Whether or not you fully understand the ins and outs of big data, the most important thing that you must remember is that it must be processed and analyzed in a “cost-effective manner”, whether the big data itself is owned by a company or a single individual.  Due to the fact that big data technology enables one to analyze data as it streams toward their company, they can establish what is significant for deeper analysis.  For this reason, people can intelligently decide to store only what is more important data in the data warehouse, thus improving efficiency and saving on storage costs.