... "companies that haven’t put together comprehensive plans for managing and exploiting 'Big Data' expect that the price tag for that failure to act will be $71 million in lost revenue per year."
So what exactly is 'Big Data'?
In IT-speak, Big Data is a collection of datasets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools.
There are currently around nine billion devices connected to the internet, mostly computers and smartphones. That number will soar to 50 billion by 2020 and include everything from cars to pharmaceutical packaging to drill bits on oil wells.
According to Wikipedia [take a deep breath now!]: "The challenges include capture, curation, storage, search, sharing, analysis and visualization. The trend to larger datasets is due to the additional information derivable from analysis of a single large set of related data, as compared to separate smaller sets with the same total amount of data, allowing correlations to be found to "spot business trends, determine quality of research, prevent diseases, link legal citations, combat crime, and determine real-time roadway traffic conditions."
Warns a Forbes.com article: If you think we’ve got Big Data problems now—with “only” about 9 billion devices connected to the internet—what’s the situation going to be like when that number soars to 50 billion at the end of the decade?
Oracle president Mark Hurd recently raised the possibility that unless businesses and government agencies can seize control over this Big Data explosion, then they’ll run the risk of simply being overwhelmed by vast volumes of data that they can’t find, control, manage, or secure—let alone analyze and exploit.
Read the original unabridged Forbes.com article.