Biig Data

Big Data and How It Affects Businesses
Daniel Gibaud
ECPI University 

Big Data and How It Affects Businesses
In 2012, the concept of “Big Data” became a widely debated issue as we now live in the information and Internet-based era where everyday up to 2.5 exabytes (one billion GB) of data are created, and the number is doubling every forty months (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2012). According to a recent research from IBM (2012), ninety percent of the data in the world has been created in the last two years alone, and Internet activity during each day will generate more data than all the data combined in the Internet twenty years ago.
Networks and the cloud technology allows processing power and data storage cost to be at a relatively low price which results in the huge database collection and global access (IDC, 2012). By developing algorithms, Big Data enables us to have a better prediction of what will happen in the future based on previous data and allow us to make better decisions (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2012). The emerging data-driven economy can be categorized by two main characteristics which are the abundance of complex data and the real time speed of change (Johnson, 2012).
Big Data is not just about being large in size, but also about the variety of both structured and unstructured data. “It can be captured, communicated, aggregated, stored and analyzed which is now becoming part of the function of the global economy” (Brown et al, A, 2011, p.25). Like Brad Brown said, Big Data can be derived from anything and anywhere. It is not just the closed-structured data processed in highly organized databases by corporations, but also those unstructured data from web-browsing trails, posts on social media websites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records both online and offline, and sensor signals to GPS tracking systems which have proven to be crucial in revealing insights about consumer behavior (Corn, 2012).
Data becomes more...