Big Data - Explanation and definition of Big Data

What is Big Data

Big Data is defined as the set of tools for the managing, processing and analysis of large volumes of data of all kinds which can not be managed by traditional tools. Big data technology has the objective to analyze data and information in an intelligent way to help correct decision making.

The main objective of big data is to provide a technological infrastructure to businesses and organizations in order to be able to store, process and analyze economic, fast and flexible way the large amount of data generated daily, for this is necesssary the development and the implementation of both hardware and specific software to manage this explosion of data in order to extract value information for our business.

It is a fact that the amount of digital information generated daily in our planet grows exponentially, giant and powerful database where they are stored for example all money movements that occur in a bank, the information recorded points sales of large shopping malls and all information generated in social networks, blogs and websites that are updated daily, are examples among others of generating sources of information and data. In this regard there are studies that say that every day is generated much digital information as the equivalent of the entire written throughout the history information, surely we live in the age of digital information.

Faced with this new reality of the vast amount of data generated daily, many companies and organization wishing to use this information in order to improve the performance of their services or business, in this way big data technology has been developed in order to capture , store and analyze all this data in order to obtain useful information for our business.

We can define Big Data technology through its 4 dimensions:

• Data volume - As its name suggests Big data must be able to manage a large volume of data being generated daily by businesses and organizations around the world, for example the American supermarket chain Wallmart stores generates more than 1 million business transactions per hour by identifying products that customers buy, more than 100.000 Gigabytes of information stored in the social network Facebook daily and 72 million downloads are made at the online store Appstore.

• Variety of data - Big data must have the ability to combine a variety of digital information in different formats which can be presented either in video, audio or text format. Different sources of information and new technologies wearables monitored our physical activity, the internet of things connected devices and machines to each other, millions of text messages on social networks like Facebook or Twitter, millions of videos uploaded to YouTube per day. among others are examples of generators of different types of information.

• Speed - The Big data technology must be able to store and work with real-time information generating sources such as sensors, video cameras, social networks, blogs, websites ... sources that generate millions of data to the second, on the other hand the ability to analyze such data have to be fast to reduce long processing times presenting the traditional tools of analysis.

• Accurate - Finally the Big Data is to be able to treat and analyze intelligently this vast amount of data in order to obtain a true and useful information that allows us to improve our decision-making.

With all this we can define big data as a set of tools that allows us to capture, store and manage large amounts of varied information at a high rate of speed allowing obtain accurate and useful data for the optimal decision-making.

Big Data applications

Numerous companies and organizations around the world need to store and properly manage this deluge of data and information generated daily, big data technology is applied indiscriminately in numerous fields and sectors within the scope of private enterprise, organizations and scientific centers even governments that manage entire cities and countries have found their best chance this technology that allows them to optimize their decision-making and results.

On numerous occasions the information collected by private companies is treated and analyzed in order to increase sales and profits, companies such as Google, Amazon and Apple have customized its ads to the preferences and needs of the user following an analysis of the searches or purchases performed, on the other hand this information allows companies to predict future demands of a product or improving the services offered to its users.

In science big data is used in numerous applications such as weather forecasting, genomics and analysis of the composition of matter. The European research organization CERN is a body reference and pioneer in the use of Big Data, it is curious as the study of the interactions and fundamental particles that make up matter generates a huge amount of information, for which the particle accelerator LHC generates collisions of two protons at a speed close to light, lie about 150 million sensors capture information about the collision happening 14 million collisions every second, the amount of data generated per second is really huge.

Governments use this technology to improve their services to their citizens, some of the applications that have implemented big data technology has been in the French city of Lyon, thanks to this technology with data capture using sensors located throughout the city it has been able to analyze the traffic congestion in order to predict at any time when it will produce a jam so that automatically change traffic signals in order to improve traffic flow.

Even political parties use these new technologies to reach a greater number of votes, known was the case with the campaign of Barack Obama in 2012 in which used big data to approach and meet the preferences and needs of its citizens allowing you to make speeches and political programs tailored to the needs of its citizens.

Google has applied big data applications as their automatic language translation, through big data tools google overturned all the information tracked on the Internet comparing official documents translated from one language to another and personal web pages, this huge database has allowed Google develop the best language translator currently present.

Big data can be applied in multinational companies such as Google, Facebook or Coca-cola as well as small businesses, for example the case of a small company after applying big data to a particular profile social networking users get useful information to generate a new service that meets the needs of those users getting new customers.

The industrial sector has found in big data the perfect technology to improve its processes, for example the use of sensors that record data on the state of the components of a machine with subsequent treatment by big data will allow us to predict the maintenance of a way more effectively saving time and unnecessary costs.

Applications to analyze the clima, the values of the shares or the traffic in real time, other applications that allow us to predict trends in trade, crime to even when a virus outbreak or epidemic in a population will occur, although it seems a futuristic vision today it is real thanks to big data technology.

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