What is Big data Technology? | Future of Big data

We all use smartphones but have you ever wondered how much data it generates in the form of texts, phone calls, emails, photos, videos, searches, and music.

Approximately 40 exabytes of data gets generated every month by a single smartphone user.

Now imagine this number multiplied by 5 billion smartphone users that's a lot for our mind to even process isn't it in fact this amount of data is quite a lot for traditional computing systems to handle and this massive amount of data is what we term as big data.

Let's have a look at the data generated per minute on the internet - 2.1 Million Snaps are shared on Snapchat, 3.8 million Search queries are made on Google, 1 million people log on to Facebook, 4.5 Million videos are watched on YouTube, 188 million emails are sent.

That's a lot of data so how do you classify any data as big data

This is possible with the concept of 5 V's "volume velocity, variety, veracity, and value.

Let us understand this with an example

Volume -

The healthcare industry hospitals and clinics across the world generate massive volumes of data 2314 exabytes of data are collected annually.

Velocity -

In the form of patient records and test results. All this data is generated at a very high speed which attributes to the velocity of big data.

Variety -

Refers to the various data types such as structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data. Examples include Excel records, log files, and x-ray images.

Veracity -

The accuracy and trustworthiness of the generated data are termed Veracity.

Value -

Analyzing all this data will benefit the medical sector by enabling faster disease detection, better treatment, and reduced cost this is known as the Value of Big Data.

But how do we store and process this big day?

To do this job we have various frameworks such as Cassandra, Hadoop, and spark let us take Hadoop as an example and see how Hadoop stores and processes Big Data.

Hadoop uses a distributed file system known as Hadoop distributed file system to store big data. If you have a huge file your file will be broken down into smaller chunks and stored in various machines not only that when you break the file you also make copies of it which goes into different nodes.

This way you store your big data in a distributed way and make sure that even if one machine fails your data is safe on another.

Now that we have stored and processed our big data. We can analyze this data for numerous applications in games like Halo3 and Call of Duty designers analyze user data to understand at which stage most of the user's pause, restart, or quit playing this insight can help them rework the storyline of the game and improve the user experience which in turn reduces the customer churn rate.

Similarly, Big Data also helped with disaster management during Hurricane sandy in 2012. It was used to gain a better understanding of the effect of the storm on the east coast of the US and necessary measures were taken it could predict the Hurricanes landfall five days in advance which wasn't possible earlier.

These are some of the clear indications of how valuable big data can be once it is accurately processed and analyzed.