Did you know that every minute over $300,000 is spent on online shopping, over 7000 photos are updated online and over 600 videos are updated on YouTube every day? The amount of data in our world is exploding and this is what we call as BIG DATA.

Big data is a buzzword, used to describe a massive volume of both structured and unstructured data. It is so large that it is difficult to process it using traditional database and software techniques. Mobile is everywhere – more people have a cell phone than running water and 25% of the world will be on a social network – that’s what created all of this big data. We go for shopping in a store, we purchase, do the billing and this also becomes a part of Big Data.

Datasets grow in size because they are increasingly being gathered by cheap and numerous information-sensing mobile devices, aerial (remote sensing), software logs, cameras, microphones, radio-frequency identification (RFID) readers, and wireless sensor networks. To extract meaningful value from big data, you need optimal processing power, analytics capabilities and skills.

What is the Impact of Big Data and how has it transformed businesses to be future ready?

Every day social media is abuzz with communication around brands. Thousands and thousands of likes are recorded, comments posted, tweets and retweets sent out, images clicked and shared on Instagram, posts curated and pinned on Pinterest, video shared, viewed, liked, and left midway, to name a few things that social media adds to the variety of big data. Big Data also lets ecommerce businesses create more personalized offers and communications. Big Data enables merchants to track each user’s behaviour and connect the dots to determine the most effective ways to convert one-time customers into repeat buyers.

Thus, insights from big data can enable all employers to make better decisions – deepening customer engagement, optimizing operations, preventing threats and fraud, and capitalizing on new sources of revenue. Big data analytics provides a deeper customer understanding which translates to a sustainable competitive advantage for the future. Big Data skills include natural language processing and text mining, and familiarity with Clojure, Scala, Python, Hadoop and Java; also useful are data mining skills with tools like R and Mathlab; finally, look for scripting and functional language skills with Erlang and new database development skills with such rarities as Cassandra and Couch DB.

To conclude, big data is simply large amount of data, which is getting generated at a fast pace in variety of situations. It is getting trendy due to rapid technology changes. The scope of being a Big Data analyst is high and currently, out of the employees required for Big Data analysis, only 1/3 are hired and working.

Contributed by : Anukriti Jain (Student of 2016 at IBS Gurgaon).