Applications of Big Data
                     Applications of Big Data
Jenny Knight
Writes for 
Small and Medium Business Corner & 
SMB Corner
Big Data refers to the huge storage which deals with large amount of 
information data in form of structured and unstructured data. The increase 
in technology yields modern services such as E commerce, cloud based 
services but at the same time has huge impact on business controls. 
Organizations are facing many challenges in terms of data management 
such as storage, retrieval, analysis and data-collection. These things are 
becoming difficult to manage through traditional information process.
For instance, the New York stock exchange produces approx. 1TB (terabyte) 
of data every day, Twitter produces approx. 7 TB of data and Facebook gets 
more than 10TB of data every day. Dealing with such big chunk of data 
every day is not easy for anyone because it requires huge database to 
manage, control and process the data. With big data, today people are able 
to make insightful analysis and are able to derive great value from it. It is 
adding value to businesses as many organizations are checking the patterns 
in data to discover the consumer behavior. Since big data is providing 
abundant data storage, organizations are able to solve critical issues by 
doing the statistical analysis of the entire data.
The features of Big Data can be classified as four ‘V’s which is volume, 
velocity, variety and value.
Volume
Volume in Big Data indicates large amount of data stored from various 
sources. The storage scale of data keeps increasing from Gigabyte (GB) to 
Terabyte (TB) followed by petabyte, Exabyte and Zettabyte. There is no end 
to the volume of data getting added to the system.
Velocity
Velocity in Big Data means not only intake of data but also process, analyze 
and utilize the data effectively. If you are dealing with more number of 
clients then you have to face a velocity related issue and challenges can be 
prevented by increasing the supported cloud storage.
Variety
Big data can have varied data structures, while some can be structured such 
as numerical data others can have unstructured formats like audio, video 
and text. Earlier the data processing was simple but with increase in 
technology like social networking, IOT (Internet of things), mobile 
computing and selling advertisements, the complexity in dealing with 
unstructured data is also increasing. Dealing with such huge data has 
become a great burden for companies both in monitoring the transactions 
and do analytical research to derive the conclusions.
Value
It is obvious that with increase in technology, internet data is increasing 
enormously. The technological advance is also affecting the cost of data 
storage and processing abilities. Since big data contains different data 
formats like voice, text, video etc, it becomes difficult to process the data 
and derive real value from it. The extent to which data has to be processed 
to get information is measured as value density or information per 
Terabyte. The challenge is to filter the data for valuable information and 
structure it for usage. Value density in big data should be a continuous 
process, as the data keeps on increasing it should get processed and 
structured for better usage.
Application of Big Data
Retail Industry
It’s true that Big Data and Analytics can’t replace the creative minds but 
now smart marketers are relying on data more than ever. They are using it 
as a tool to perform better. Big Data is implemented at every step in retail 
sector to help customer predict the best deals, get latest information on 
products and have flexibility to access the products 24*7.
Science and Research
Big Data plays a very crucial role in improving science and research. For 
instance, CERN a nuclear research organization requires 65,000 processors 
to compute and analyze approximately 30 PB (petabytes) of data every day. 
Since it is a huge data to deal with, they are depending on huge number of 
data centers to process the data.
Health and Life Sciences
Big data is now being used in healthcare industry to become more efficient 
and productive. It is used in applications for clinical and disease pattern 
analysis, quality care of patient, discovery of drug and development, 
application of wearable devices etc. By collecting the medical data into one 
system, it becomes easy to know as much information as possible about a 
patient. This gives scope for the medical professionals to resolve the health 
issue easily.
Digital and Web Media
Big Data improves Ad targeting, forecasting, social media analysis and 
optimization. Big data allows digital advertisers collect the relevant data 
from different sources and do the analysis of information for better 
personalized and targeted ads.
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Thank you for time in reading this article!