What is Big Data?

Every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data — so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone.
Gartner defines Big Data as high volume, velocity and variety information assets that demand cost-effective, innovative forms of information processing for enhanced insight and decision making.

According to IBM, 80% of data captured today is unstructured, from sensors used to gather climate information, posts to social media sites, digital pictures and videos, purchase transaction records, and cell phone GPS signals, to name a few. All of this unstructured data is Big Data.
Big data spans three dimensions: Volume, Velocity and Variety.

Volume: Enterprises are awash with ever-growing data of all types, easily amassing terabytes - even petabytes - of information.

Turn 12 terabytes of Tweets created each day into improved product sentiment analysis
Convert 350 billion annual meter readings to better predict power consumption

Velocity: Sometimes 2 minutes is too late. For time-sensitive processes such as catching fraud, big data must be used as it streams into your enterprise in order to maximize its value.

Scrutinize 5 million trade events created each day to identify potential fraud
Analyze 500 million daily call detail records in real-time to predict customer churn faster

Variety: Big data is any type of data - structured and unstructured data such as text, sensor data, audio, video, click streams, log files and more. New insights are found when analyzing these data types together.

Monitor 100’s of live video feeds from surveillance cameras to target points of interest
Exploit the 80% data growth in images, video and documents to improve customer satisfaction