Do you know that we are generating an enormous amount of data every day, in fact, every second. For example, every time your phone beeps with social media notifications, thousand of new videos are uploading on youtube every day, countless e-mails exchanged every day, air traffic controllers across the world communicating with planes, hence all in this scenario a great volume of data we are producing. And such data is termed as BIG DATA.
The name “BIG DATA” itself means, DATA which is BIG (in Volume) and impossible to analyze and process using traditional approach or regular data processing techniques.
“Around 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is generated every day which is equivalent to tens of billions of gigabytes.”
Sounds like BIG DATA, isn’t it..!!
Big Data can be classified based on:
Variety (structured, unstructured, or semi-structured)
Velocity (speed of generating data)
Volumes (Quantity of Data)
To understand the concept of Big Data, let’s see an example. Suppose you have 10 terabytes of unorganized files in your computer, which includes information like your passwords, to-do list, old files, pending invoices, grocery bills, unattained appointments, thousand of unread e-mails, bucket list, project files, list of places you want to visit, etc
And if you want to break these complex data into their respective categories using traditional data processing techniques, then it seems impossible. And even if you want to make it happen and possible, then it would take great efforts, patience, and time, which again makes it beyond your reach.
To tackle this inconveniency, Big Data comes into play, and with the help of Big Data these data can process into a fraction of seconds. Big Data uses specialized real-time data streaming tools like Apache Hadoop, Spark and many others to analyze, process, and store such amounts of data.
How do these Big Data Tools work?
For instance, consider Apache Hadoop and see how it Store, Process, and Analyze Big Data.
Storing of Data
Hadoop uses a distributed system to store large files where these data files are broken down smaller chunks and a copy of each file is saved in a separate node or machine. So that if one machine fails, the data is still preserved into another one.
Processing of Data
Once the files are stored, it’s time to analyze the data using the Hadoop processing engine also known as Map Reduce. Hadoop MapReduce processes data files by breaking down huge tasks into subtasks.
Later on these tasks are further assigned to separate machines where they processed. Hence, multiple machines are working parallelly to process data or to accomplish the assigned task. Sometimes they often referred by the name as parallel processing.
Once all machines are done with their task their output is collected which are further add together to deliver the final outcome.
Analyzing of Data
Now the data is successfully stored and processed, it’s time to analyze it. The represented data can be analyzed manually (By your team) or automatically using software and other frameworks. By analyzing the data, you can take transformative and productive actions for your organization and provide better service to your customers.
Here are some real-life examples showing how Big Data is transforming data and businesses around the world.
Healthcare
Big Data plays a crucial role in saving our lives. Therefore it has a huge impact on the health care sector. By analyzing and processing medical data, it helps to discover a cure for diseases. Big Data can be also used to provide personal care to patients based on their medical history. Data represented by Big Data helps doctor to know more about their patient’s diseases and to take necessary action for treating them.
The other big advantage of Big Data in healthcare is that it helps to cut costs on unnecessary market research expenditure, and provide a reliable and affordable care service to patients.
By using Big Data, we can also predict epidemic outbreaks and can take necessary actions before things get out of control.
Media & Entertainment
Have you ever notice those social media ads that pop up on your screen. Well, these ads seem relevant to your choiBIG Data -ce because it occurs based on your previous browsing history, your likes products, searching engine history, etc.
There’s no doubt that Big Data gives valuable business insights and helps organization to provide the best recommendation results to their user.
By using Big Data companies can get to know more about their customer, their culture, what they like, what they don’t. Moreover, Big Data also helps to boost customer engagement by acknowledging their emotions, feedback, reviews about their product or service.
Education
Well, education is the key for a bright future and with Big Data it could be more sparkling and brilliant. Big Data unleash new ways for educators to spread their wisdom to every single student. By analyzing students data educators can abled to work upon their weak areas, subjects, and concepts and help them to improve.
Big Data enabled educators to provide their students with customized learning programs to help in their assignments and exams. In addition, Big Data also helps placement companies to hire the students, interns who got required skills and knowledge to fit in their position.
Weather forecasting
With Big data, weather forecasting becomes more accurate and advanced. By analyzing and processing data, we can predict any sudden or dramatic change in weather and can warn people before things get out of hand.
Big Data provides future-driven insights for the selected geographical region and reduce the chances of severity affected on humans due to hurricanes, rainstorm, tsunami, natural disaster, etc.
Logistics
Here, Big Data helps to determine the minimum time taken by goods to reach their destination. It also streamlines the movements of goods smartly by analyzing traffic on different routes and then preferring fastest possible routes. Travel and Tourism
Big Data not only helps goods to reach their destination faster using route optimization techniques, but also makes inventory and warehouse management effective, efficient, and smart. Companies don’t need to rely on traditional approaches for sourcing and storing of goods in your inventory/warehouse. Big Data also enables companies to run demand-driven supply chains.
With such advancements in logistics, there’s no doubt that Big Data also improves customer satisfaction and loyalty. Reputed logistics companies like UPS have already started using Big Data for betterment of their customer service standards.
Travel and Tourism
Using Big Data, hotels around the world can deliver great customer service to their customers. Hotels can offer best package, and accommodation to its customer by analyzing their past hotel experience.
Customer past experience helps hotel to know more about their choice, their needs, what they expect from their service, what are their favorite continental food, etc.
Data analyzed using Big Data helps also assist hotels to recommend best packages to their customers. And depending on their preference they can filter out suitable services for them. Companies like Airbnb are already using Big Data to provide best accommodation for their customer.
Government and Law
Big Data helps the government to stop crime by analyzing region wise data. The big advantage is that government can also forecast any criminal activities before they happen.
With Big Data, the government can bring a meaningful change in society and transform people’s lives. The availability of such a sheer volume of data aids the government to reduce poverty and unemployment to a large extent.
So, this is all about Big Data real-life applications.
However, we are still trying to implement Big Data technology in other rest of the applications and hope it will bring transformative changes.
We have just started using Big Data and it is not completely evolved around us. But the good thing is, we are continuously taking innovative leaps and successfully discovering new ways to bring Big Data in our lives for a better future.