Big data – what is it, and how is it used? What is big data? Who utilizes it, and why would a company be interested in big data? What does big data provide for a company? What are the security concerns regarding big data? What privacy concerns should individuals have regarding big data? Where is big data stored?
Big data – what is it, and how is it used?
Big data is a set of large data sets or the large volume of data in a structured, semi-structured, or unstructured way that is utilized in business on a daily basis. Business analyzes big data to get insights to take strategic level decisions for certain business moves. Big data is difficult to process or analyze by traditional database techniques or by the database management system.
Big data can be described by 3V’s,
- Volume
- Velocity
- Variety
Big data term is used with petabytes and exabytes of data. These data sets cannot be integrated easily. It cannot be formulated or manipulated by the traditional relational database as data takes time to load and costs for analysis. Therefore, new techniques for storing and analyzing data have been identified with an artificial intelligence program which uses a complex algorithm to get insights and to aggregate data sets.
It is associated with cloud computing with Hadoop to store, process, and get a result from large data sets scattered in clusters at multiple sources.
Who utilizes it, and why would a company be interested in big data? What does big data provide for a company?
Database analysis is extremely important for an organization to chase or evaluate its performance. Big data examine facts and figures of targets which are set by business to achieve the organization’s business objectives. It does not matter how much data one considers; instead, the thing that matters is what you can do or how you can analyze and interpret that data. The firm can get answers from big data to reduce cost, time, and for new product development and launch, and strategic decision making as well.
Business tasks are accomplished accordingly;
- Risk Assessment
- Root cause analysis
- Finding issues, defects, failures, problems.
- Analyzing the customer’s buying habits and study consumer behavior.
- Requirement gathering and analysis.
- Salesforce performance, sales volume, sales target, marketing research, product development
- Data logs, data registers, performance measurement report.
- Market research analysis and customize a report.
- Decision-making areas and other business information.
Some of the social giants like Twitter, Google, Facebook, Linked-in, Amazon, etc. are analyzing user preferences on search terms to address the target market for advertising certain personal pages.
What are security concerns regarding big data? What privacy concerns should individuals have regarding big data?
There is a big concern about data collection and its privacy. We can simply sort data from large data set through techniques such as data mining. We can see many consumers are concerned about sharing their personal information across the web and the security issues involved by providing consent to the use of their personal information online.
- Watch on Whatever You Post Online
Social media platforms are using your personal information to get insight like your family details, income details, location, occupation, etc. Sometimes sharing this information might cause severe consequences and have privacy embarrassments.
- An unethical way based on interpretations
Big data analytics are used to interpret consumers’ buying behaviors. Big data analytics are therefore used by organizations to take business decisions without any account of considerations of ethical issues about human lives and their respective rights. It is illegal to use someone’s personal information without prior permission that needs to be considered.
- Work Discrimination
Data analytics are also used by HR to select job candidates, promotions, increment, etc. But some time result of big data is not 100% accurate, and we cannot rely on making such decisions which affect candidates’ career. So this kind of discrimination leads to specific issues.
- Intellectual property and copyrights issues
It may be difficult to get patents as due to a large volume of scattered data patent offices are not able to verify that submitted patent.
Where is big data stored?
Big data is interpreted in the form of input, output operations per second and is also called as IOPS, which is the most necessary element to deliver data. Large scale computing environments are required to set infrastructure to set big data environment like servers with direct-attached storage (DAS).
Such infrastructure, run based on technologies like Hadoop, NoSQL, and Cassandra as various analytics tools have PCIe flash storage. There cannot be a shared room in this type of configuration.
Big data is stored as scale-out or clustered NAS, which has complex computing environment and parallel systems different from ordinary file system processing.