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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